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Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley cannot memory-hole their despicable validation of lies about the election.

This is the last cartoon I will write under the presidency of Donald Trump (barring a worst case scenario in 2024, but I’m going to let that be a problem for another day). I wanted to mark this moment of transition, but this is gestural, rather than inclusive — obviously there was no way to capture the horrors of the last four years in a single cartoon. And as always, if you enjoy this work, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining Sparky’s List!

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology. Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon following inquiries from The Washington Post and other media outlets. Third-party merchants that attempt to evade Amazon's systems to list QAnon goods may find their selling privileges revoked, Fan added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Republican attempt to overthrow this nation's government is ongoing. Propaganda attempts continue in an attempt to delegitimize the outcome of the last election; even after an assassination attempt targeting top national leaders, over 100 Republican officials continued to promote the same hoax claims that stoked the violence. An idiotic but still influential Trump adviser was spotted just yesterday carrying papers arguing for the invocation of the Insurrection Act and martial law; other top conservatives who pushed hard for the election to be nullified by any means necessary are now attempting to dodge repercussions for promoting sedition.

It is in this context that the Trump administration, and specifically acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, an apparent incompetent who remains accused by Joe Biden and his team of withholding key national security information during the transition, is suddenly ordering the immediate installation of a hard-right ex-Devin Nunes aide and fervent Trump ally Michael Ellis as National Security Agency general counsel.

That’s big news. It is a career civil service position, and one that Ellis is dubiously qualified for; the move is transparently to install a Trump loyalist into the very top ranks of the NSA's non-appointed leadership, giving that loyalist top access to this nation's secrets and information about how they are acquired. From this position, Ellis can continue his longstanding efforts to sabotage any national security investigation that too closely implicates Donald Trump, Donald Trump's numerous allies, or others in the party's growing collection of seditionists and extortionists.

While this sounds like an extremist interpretation, it is also likely to be the correct one. Ellis is no minor figure. He was responsible for moving the phone records of Donald Trump's attempted extortion of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to a codeword-classified server, an attempt to hide evidence from government whistleblowers and to Congress, and was among those officials who stonewalled congressional probes into those acts. He was previously behind Rep. Devin Nunes' bizarre 2017 invitation to the White House, where Ellis showed Nunes intelligence reports selectively leaked to build the lie that the Trump campaign was being improperly surveilled by intelligence officials—an attempt to delegitimize the counterintelligence investigations into Russian espionage efforts to install Trump into the presidency.

That each of these actions by Ellis was an attempt to immunize Trump and Trump's allies from charges of conspiring with a foreign government to commit a criminal act should be noted. A position as the NSA’s general counsel puts him in superb position to continue that sabotage.

While investigations into Ellis' acts on Trump’s behalf may yet render him something very close to a traitor, he has definitely been a key player in numerous of those criminal and possibly-criminal acts. That is who the White House, with assistance from acting secretary of defense Miller, is ordering into a top NSA position in the very last days of their power to do so.

We all know why. There is no non-malignant justification for the rapid "burrowing" of a top Republican enabler of crimes into a top career position in which he will have broad authority to block investigations of national security threats that happen to touch on Republican officials. The Republican coup against our democracy continues, and shows no signs of slowing.

It goes without saying that Donald Trump and all those with even a passing connection to Donald Trump plan to be as crooked as possible up until the very last minute of Trump's for-the-sake-of-argument "presidency." The New York Times reports that some of Trump's "allies" have been attempting to cash in, in recent weeks, by collecting fees from wealthy felons or their associates" who want Donald Crimeboy Trump to issue them presidential pardons.

The premise is not complicated. Those with access to Trump, like his ex-personal lawyer John Dowd, are advertising their closeness to Trump as a means by which well-off felons can get their pardon requests heard—for a fee, of course. A steep fee. Part of what that fee gets you, if you are a well-to-do criminal, is Dowd's advice on how to "leverage Mr. Trump's grievances about the justice system" to make your own case that The Law Was Super Mean To You, says the Times. Well, duh.

While the Times lists out a few of the Trump-adjacent profiteers looking not to illegally sell pardons, but to wink-wink sell their influence with Trump to bring those would-be pardons to his attention, it goes without saying that ultragrifter Rudy Giuliani makes an appearance. Giuliani's asking price for one pardon was $2 million.

None of this is surprising. It was a given that anyone who has ever dined at Mar-a-Lago or worked for Trump in any capacity would, in the waning weeks of his failed administration, make a last-ditch cash grab to monetize whatever adjacency to Trump's power they might still have. And it's a given, at this point, that Trump himself would be willing to sabotage justice for anyone he perceived as an ally. That is what he does, and what he has demanded of others in his administration.

These plans, however, suffer from a possibly fatal flaw. People around Trump are collecting big fees to try to push Trump into granting specific pardons—but nowhere do we hear that those Trump allies are sharing those fees with Donald Trump himself. If Trump learns there's money involved but he's not getting a cut, he's just as likely to become enraged as to grant any particular pardon.

Will his eagerness to subvert the rule of law on behalf of his allies overwhelm his obsession with squeezing as much money out of his "presidency" as possible? We'll know in the next few days.

Remember Cliven Bundy, the stubborn Nevada rancher whose decades-long refusal to pay grazing fees for cattle he runs on federal land led to a 2014 armed stand-off at his family ranch and in 2016, another armed stand-off led by his son Ammon Bundy in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge? The latter had been home to the indigenous Moapa Paiute until they were forced out at gunpoint in the 1870s. The elder Bundy claims ancestral rights to that land because of his libertarian views and, he claims, because his ancestors came on The Mayflower. Bundy wound up in pre-trial detention for 18 months over the 2014 stand-off, but because of prosecutorial misconduct, he was released and his case adjudged a mistrial. New charges weren’t filed. He and his large family continue to run cattle on federal land without paying the modest grazing fees. By 2014, 21 years after he began refusing to pay for this use of public land, the back fees had accumulated to more than $1 million. Currently, 24,000 permit holders are charged $1.35 per animal per month for grazing—a very good deal. But not as good as Bundy’s steal.

Now the 74-year-old rancher has advice for President-elect Joe Biden’s administration: It better not come trying to collect those unpaid fees, because he and his militant supporters are willing to "walk towards guns" again if that happens. While the new administration has more than a full platter of priorities to deal with when it comes into office Wednesday, some environmental advocates hope that action is taken to stop this scofflaw. 

Bundy was interviewed by right-wing radio host Pete Santilli last Saturday, Jennifer Yachnin at GreenWire reports:

"The Bundy ranch saga will continue, won't it? Do you believe so? Do you believe that they'll come after you?" asked Santilli, who (struck) a plea deal over his own role in the Nevada standoff.

"Yes, I do," Bundy replied. "They've been waiting for this ... but it's not only for (the) Bundy ranch; it's for all Americans. We're in trouble if it changes."

He later added: "We're going to have to go forward. If we have to walk forward towards guns, which we did at the Bundy ranch, we have to do that. And we have to have faith.”

Bundy’s views don’t come close to meshing with those of the vast majority of Americans, including ranchers who follow federal land-use laws and pay their fees without whining or latching onto ludicrous theories about how only the states and individuals, not the federal government, can own land. He is a supporter of the sovereign citizen movement that asserts county sheriffs are the most powerful officials in the nation. He doesn’t accept that federal laws supersede those of the states and believes citizens aren’t required to obey them. He has received support from the Oath Keepers, Tenthers, and White Mountain Defenders—all right-wing extremist groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers his views close to that of the extremist Posse Comitatus. 

As Western Watersheds Project Executive Director Erik Molvar told Yachnin, "The lax law enforcement on public lands can be seen as a direct line to the lawlessness we saw in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Recapture Canyon in Utah, and now in Washington, D.C.," Molvar said, referring to the 2016 stand-off and to an illegal all-terrain vehicle protest ride in the canyon in 2015. He added, "The failure of the federal government to crack down on law on public lands has created a class of insurrectionists who feel entitled to break the law whenever they want."

Just like so many folks who’ve been empowered by the grifter Trump regime.

"If we continue to allow these very highly publicized violations of public laws and public lands, then it's going to become a free-for-all out there," Molvar said, taking note of a dam and associated equipment that Bundy's son Ryan Bundy built across Gold Butte National Monument last spring. "There will be no semblance of law and order on federal public lands, and that will be a major disservice to all Americans."

Molvar wants the Biden administration not to let the situation fester. While it’s true the government botched matters when it tried to collect back fees in 2014, Molvar and other public lands advocates argue that the feds can easily get this situation under control. Among the fixes: issuing bench warrants holding Bundy in contempt of court for trespassing and refusing to pay grazing fees, or putting a lien on Bundy’s property (such as proceeds from cattle auctions.)

Richard Spotts, who before retirement spent 15 years as the planning and environmental coordinator for the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Arizona Strip District, told Yachnin, "It boggles the mind why these obvious tactics have not been used, and even why BLM kept planning these huge, all-or-nothing roundups." Liens on Bundy's cattle would at least "take the profit motive out of trespass grazing," Spotts said.

Public lands are the people’s lands. While critics of some BLM and the National Park Service land policies have valid points to make, the Bundys and their ilk don’t care about reforming policy so that land is better protected. They want no regulations or fees hindering their profiteering off the taxpayers. That, of course, isn’t just a philosophy of a few extremist ranchers. The extractive industries have done a bang-up job of polluting public land for more than a century, paying a pittance to the government for the land they have often wrecked beyond what reclamation efforts can fully restore. But except when they are cheating Indian tribes with sweetheart royalty deals, they, unlike Bundy, are at least paying something. 

Joe Biden doubtless isn’t giving any thought to Cliven Bundy’s threat. As Molvar points out, federal authorities have remedies that don’t involve any firearms to walk toward. All Biden has to do when the time comes is snap his fingers.

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Having made it past November, and even past the Jan. 5 runoff in Georgia, it may seem like the airwaves and signboards near you would finally be free of political ads. However … that’s not quite true. While the idea that ads are already showing up for the 2022 election cycle might even be enough to generate howls, there’s a reason that these ads should be welcomed. Because these ads are all about holding Republicans accountable for what they’ve done over the last four years.

That starts with ads that are going on the air in Wisconsin to detail the explicit connection between Sen. Ron Johnson and the violent attempt to overthrow the government. Voters to the south might not be catching those ads, but they could still run across a Josh Hawley billboard from MeidasTouch. It’s all just part of the move to clear the halls of Congress … of the people who promoted a violent attack on the halls of Congress.

During Wednesday night’s impeachment hearing, newly seated St. Louis Rep. Cori Bush took down white supremacy in 30 seconds flat. Just a day before, she filed a resolution calling for the expulsion of 100 or more House Republicans who didn’t just vote against certifying the results of the Electoral College, but promoted the idea that the election had been “stolen”—the big lie that drove rioters into the Capitol on Jan. 6.

It’s unlikely that House members will garner the necessary votes to discharge a quarter of their members. However, if the investigation into members who actively assisted in planning the insurrection turns up definitive evidence, there is a very good chance that some members might not just be expelled, but indicted.

On the Senate side, both Hawley and Ted Cruz are likely to survive their support for overturning the outcome of the election, even with Hawley continuing to signal his support for that effort in the hours immediately after the Senate had been forced to flee for their lives. However, it’s very likely voters are going to get plenty of reminders about which senator was giving terrorists a raised fist salute on that terrible day.

However, as The New York Times reports, Wisconsin voters don’t need to wait to see the lines between Johnson and the insurgency traced. A television ad from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin hit the air Wednesday morning. It signals the start of a solid week in which Johnson will be pounded on both television and social media for his role in spreading lies about the 2020 election. 

Johnson—who has always topped the chart of senators most likely to be Russian assets—initiated and promoted lies about the election both before and after the votes were counted. And he added one more lie, because after telling voters that he was going to self-limit to two terms in the Senate, he might just decide to stay in the Senate so he can block legislation from the Democratic House. That would put Johnson up for his next term in 2022, and also turns him into a big target for Democrats seeking to dislodge a Trump-Putin fan from a state Joe Biden won.

The ad pulls no punches. It features pictures of the mob swarming over the Capitol while recalling a stinging editorial in the Milwaukee Journal that goes after several members of the Senate’s “sedition caucus,” including both Johnson and Hawley. That editorial calls on Johnson to resign immediately rather than waiting 21 months for Wisconsin voters to send him packing.

Johnson is unlikely to quit. Neither are the ads.

John Trumpian shares a report from Live Science: A man brewed a tea from "magic mushrooms" and injected the concoction into his veins; several days later, he ended up at the emergency department with the fungus growing in his blood. The man spent 22 days in the hospital, with eight of those days in the intensive care unit (ICU), where he received treatment for multisystem organ failure. Now released, he is still being treated with a long-term regimen of antibiotic and antifungal drugs, according to a description of the case published in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. The case didn't reveal whether injecting shroom tea can cause persistent psychoactive effects, as sometimes seen when people ingest the fungus orally, the doctors wrote in the report. [...] By injecting shrooms into his bloodstream, the 30-year-old patient had hoped to relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder and opioid dependence, according to the report. His family members noted that he had recently stopped adhering to his prescribed bipolar medications and was "cycling between depressive and manic states."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump’s deplatforming has already slowed the spread of election misinformation.

In the wake of the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol that President Donald Trump heavily promoted on social media, platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and others finally moved to ban the president.

The result? A sudden drop in the online spread of election misinformation.

According to research by Zignal Labs, which the Washington Post reported on Saturday, online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent in the weeklong period following Twitter’s decision to ban Trump on January 8.

There are other factors that could have contributed to the decline, including diminished hopes on the far right of overturning the presidential election after Congress affirmed Joe Biden’s electoral victory. But to the extent that Twitter’s ban and the related scrubbing of right-wing conspiracy accounts were aimed at curbing disinformation, they appear to be working, at least in the short term. Not only has the spread of misinformation slowed, the research indicates online discussion around the topics that motivated the Capitol riot has also diminished.

“Zignal found that the use of hashtags affiliated with the Capitol riot also dipped considerably,” writes the Post, summarizing Zignal’s research. “Mentions of the hashtag #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week before the rally, dropped 95 percent. #HoldTheLine and the term ‘March for Trump’ also fell more than 95 percent.”

The leading argument against banning Trump was that despite the conspiracy theories, smears, and misinformation he spent years spreading on Twitter and other platforms, as president of the United States, it was important for social media companies to allow him to freely communicate with the public.

But that line of thinking became more tenuous in the weeks following Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden, as the president’s posts increasingly fixated on spreading lies about the election being stolen from him and on fomenting unrest, including promoting the January 6 “Stop the Steal” protest that preceded the violent takeover of the Capitol.

The breaking point finally came in the days following the violence. Instead of unequivocally denouncing the rioters, Trump defended them, writing in a tweet he posted as law enforcement was still trying to clear the Capitol on January 6 that “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away.”

(Hours earlier, Trump had posted a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence even as rioters, some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” came perilously close to encountering the vice president while he was being hastily evacuated from the Senate chamber.)

Then, on January 8, Trump posted a tweet announcing he wouldn’t be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account hours later, writing in a blog post that his inauguration tweet was being interpreted online by his supporters as “encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a ‘safe’ target, as he will not be attending.”

(Facebook has so far only suspended Trump’s account through the end of his presidential term.)

In the eight days since, Trump has resorted to releasing tweet-like statements through the White House press office. He’s characterized the moves by Facebook, Twitter, and others as an attack on free speech, but at no point has he retracted, or apologized for spreading, misinformation about the election — nor has he acknowledged the reality that Biden’s victory over him was legitimate.

Trump has reportedly considered opening an account on Parler, a social media platform favored by conservatives and many on the far-right for its lax approach to moderating content, where extremism flourishes.

But Amazon dropped Parler from its web-hosting service following revelations that Trump supporters had used it as a forum to organize the Capitol riot, and it’s unclear whether it’ll ever get back online.

Meanwhile, reports swirl that Trump is spending his last days in the White House isolated and embittered. It turns out that watching cable news isn’t as fun when you can’t provide live commentary about it to your tens of millions of Twitter followers. Nor, apparently, does misinformation thrive when the biggest purveyors of it are deplatformed.

John Weaver, married (to a woman) Lincoln Project cofounder and Republican operative, admitted to inappropriate sexting with men and came out as gay in a statement released on Friday.

Axios reports: “During the past week, several men have alleged on social media that Weaver sent them unsolicited and sexually suggestive messages, sometimes coupled with offers of employment or political advancement.”

Said Weaver in a statement: “For too long I have tried to live a life that wasn’t completely true, where I cleaved off an important part of myself in order to maintain what I thought was happiness and normalcy in the other part. I was lying to myself, to my family who gave me nothing but unconditional love, and to others, causing a great deal of pain to all.”

“The truth is that I’m gay,” Weaver added. “And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place.”

“To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry,” Weaver continued. “They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.”

Read the full statement at Axios.

A story about Weaver’s inappropriate conduct was published this week in The American Conservative.

I am calling on the Lincoln Project to launch a full investigation into allegations of sexual harassment leveled against John Weaver, one of the organization's co-founders. Please read my letter to @ProjectLincoln below. https://t.co/EnD6rMXsyh pic.twitter.com/Fim8d6Hqtn

— Garrett Herrin (@GarrettHerrin) January 12, 2021

The sexual harassment allegations against Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver have been removed from his Wikipedia page pic.twitter.com/2KuNPQRmm9

— Charlie Nash (@CharlieNash) January 12, 2021

The post Married Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver Admits Sending Sexually Inappropriate Texts to Male Job Applicants, Says He’s Gay appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Women at the Capitol riot are just the latest reminder of a long history.

It’s tempting to think of the storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday as toxic masculinity run amok: a mob of mostly white men, carrying guns and wearing animal skins, trying to overthrow democracy on behalf of a president who once bragged about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.”

It’s even more tempting to embrace this narrative when, in a bizarre statement, that president’s campaign press secretary describes him as “the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”

But focusing too much on masculinity obscures a crucial truth: Many women were either present at the riot or cheering on the insurrectionists from back home. There was Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and apparent devotee of QAnon ideology who was killed during the riot. There was the woman photographed with “zip-tie guy” Eric Munchel, now believed to be his mother. There was Martha Chansley, the mother of the widely photographed “QAnon shaman” who wore a horned hat and carried a spear to Congress. She wasn’t present at the riot but later defended her son in an interview, calling him “a great patriot, a veteran, a person who loves this country.”

And, of course, there were the women lawmakers who boosted conspiracy theories and false claims about the election being stolen, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon adherent who railed against Democrats and Black Lives Matter protesters in a speech on the House floor this week while wearing a mask reading “censored.” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, meanwhile, described January 6 as “1776” before the riot began, live-tweeted from the House during the attack (including a mention that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been removed from the chambers), and this week, refused to allow police to search her bag after it set off metal detectors outside Congress. During her campaign, Boebert promised to bring her gun with her to the House.

Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images

White women have been part of white supremacy in America since the very beginning, experts point out, dating back to their role in slavery. “They were at the table when the system was designed,” Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of the book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, told Vox. “They were co-architects of the system.”

That remained true after the Civil War, through the birth and evolution of the Ku Klux Klan, and during the civil rights movement when white women were some of the most vocal opponents of school integration. And it remains true today, when women hold a key role in spreading QAnon ideology and sustaining white nationalist groups and movements. “Like other parts of our economy and society, these movements would collapse without their labor,” Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, told Vox.

And if we ignore the importance of women in the Capitol riot and the groups that backed and enabled it, we can’t understand white supremacy in America — let alone dismantle it. Trying to fight racism in America without looking at white women, Jones-Rogers said, is like “addressing only the right side of the body when the left side is still sick.”

White women have been part of white supremacy from the beginning

White women’s investment in white supremacy is older than the United States itself and goes back to their role in the economy of slavery. Though white women have been seen by some historians as passive bystanders to the brutalities of slavery, they were in fact active participants, as Jones-Rogers explains in They Were Her Property. Before the Civil War, white women had little economic or political power, with one big exception: They could buy and sell enslaved people. And they did so, using enslaved people as a way of building up wealth that would not simply be transferred to a husband in marriage.

Slavery gave white women “freedom, autonomy, and agency that they could not exercise in their lives without it, so they deeply invested in it,” Jones-Rogers said.

And after the Civil War, white women didn’t simply give up on white supremacy. Instead, as Jones-Rogers puts it, they doubled down.

For many, that meant becoming active participants in the KKK, which at one point had 1.5 million female members. Some women took leadership roles, like Elizabeth Tyler, who helped revive the Klan in the late 1910s and became its “most important propagandist,” according to Darby.

Women became especially important in the Klan once they gained the right to vote. After that, white men began to see their wives, daughters, sisters, and other women in their lives “as potential allies in the effort to politicize white supremacy,” Jones-Rogers said. “They began to see them as a voting bloc.”

Bettmann Archive via Getty Images

Frederic Lewis/Archive Photos/Getty Images

And it wasn’t just because of organizations like the Klan that white women invested in institutional racism. They also played a core role in lynching by making false allegations of sexual harassment or assault, which were used as a pretext to murder Black men. And they were key players in the fight against the integration of schools, with white women using their role as mothers to legitimize their victimization of Black children, Jones-Rogers said.

Indeed, throughout the 20th century, though white women could no longer profit from slavery, they were still deriving real benefits from white supremacy — namely, a sense of social and political power in a world still dominated by white men. “Through lynching, your words have the power of life and death over an African-descended man,” Jones-Rogers explained. “Your vote can secure a place in the state, in the government, for white supremacy.”

In essence, through white supremacy, white women came to “understand themselves as individuals who wield a certain kind of power that men have to respect,” Jones-Rogers said.

Understanding white women’s role is key to fighting racism today

And that dynamic has continued into the 21st century. The landscape of white supremacy has changed, with the Klan no longer a major player (though it still exists). Today, white nationalism is less about specific groups and more about “an ideology that people subscribe to from the comfort of their own desks,” Darby said.

Because of that, it’s hard to measure exactly how many women are involved in white nationalism. It’s easier to measure attitudes. Overall, about 20 percent of white Americans of all genders “feel a sense of discontent” over the status of white people in society, Darby writes in Sisters in Hate, drawing on the work of political scientist Ashley Jardina. And white women are actually more likely than white men to hold “exclusionary views about what it means to be American, preferring boundaries around the nation’s identity that maintain it in their image.”

And while they may not always be in front at rallies or riots, women remain important “recruiters and propagandists” for white nationalism, Darby said. Erica Alduino, for example, had a key role in organizing the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. She was the one directing traffic on messaging apps and answering mundane but important questions like whether there would be shuttle buses to the rally. She didn’t speak at the event, “but that’s not the point,” Darby said. “Whether women are seen or not seen, they are such important actors in this space.”

Women have also been central to organizing pro-Trump events that spread the false claim that the election was stolen. The group Women for America First organized a “Stop the Steal” rally of thousands in November and also received a permit for a rally at the Capitol on January 6, according to the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, women have taken an even more visible role with the rise of QAnon. An ideology that began with conspiracy theories about Trump battling a “cabal” of liberals involved in child sex trafficking, QAnon has grown to include a wider array of theories and misinformation. Last year, QAnon adherents began amplifying the hashtag #SaveTheChildren, which became a vehicle for false claims about the prevalence of child sex trafficking as well as a gateway for more extreme QAnon ideas. And many of the people posting with #SaveTheChildren — including celebrities and prominent influencers — were women.

Brynn Anderson/AP

In general, QAnon has been a way to co-opt messages long targeted at women — messages about the importance of natural living or even healthy food, for example — and turn them into an indoctrination in white nationalism and xenophobia. QAnon plays into “this idea that you can cleanse yourself and your life and your family’s life of pollutants,” Darby said. Messages about avoiding genetically modified foods, for example, can slide into messages about keeping non-white children out of schools.

In the last few months, QAnon has played a key role in boosting conspiracy theories about Covid-19 restrictions and masking, and backing attempts to overturn the election. And some of the most visible proponents of QAnon have been women. Greene, for example, has been called the first QAnon member of Congress and has tweeted support for the idea of the “deep state,” a core QAnon tenet.

Meanwhile, Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed by police at the Capitol riot, had been posting QAnon-related content on social media for nearly a year prior to the insurrection, according to the Guardian. The day before the riot, she tweeted a defiant message full of QAnon slogans: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours....dark to light!”

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Despite the participation of Babbitt and others, there’s been a tendency to view the riot as largely male-dominated — and, indeed, to erase the presence of women in white supremacy throughout history. “There has been a tendency, from the colonial period to the present, to frame and to position white women as perpetual victims, in spite of the evidence to the contrary,” Jones-Rogers said.

But ignoring the fact that women have long been perpetrators of white supremacy — up to and including violence — will hamper any effort to truly fight it. “When we discount these women and the often violent and brutal roles that these women play,” Jones-Rogers said, “we neglect and we negate the impact that their activities have on their victims.”

If, by contrast, we as a society can reckon with the way that white women have been not just beneficiaries but designers of the system of white supremacy, she said, we will be better able “to dismantle the system and to address the ways in which the system has really pervaded all of our lives.”

Democrats long ago lost the messaging battle on regulations by calling them “regulations.” Every single regulation is a protection because left unimpeded, corporations will run roughshod over consumers, the environment, and anything else that stands in the way of their profits. But to put in that context, it’s a clear and easy distinction between the Democrats and Republicans: Democrats want to protect the public from the excesses of capitalism while Republicans want businesses to do whatever the f--- they want. 

Simple, right? Except it’s not exactly true. Republicans are just as pro-regulation when it impacts one of their friends. 

The last act of Brian Brooks, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as he headed to the exits was to finalize a rushed regulation prohibiting banks from blacklisting entire industries. Why was this important to Brooks and the GOP? Because many banks have stopped lending to gun manufacturers, the fossil fuel industry (and particularly drillers), and other icky and controversial types of business that reflect poorly on anyone doing business with them. 

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is a regulatory agency supposed to provide oversight of the banking industry, but it really doesn’t function as such. It’s a typical example of an industry regulating itself, with Wall Street insiders running the joint to the benefit of its “clients.” Yes, clients.

It’s a remarkable turn for the OCC, which watches over JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and other giant financial companies. The regulator has traditionally been seen as the most industry-friendly of the government’s watchdogs, with Brooks’s predecessor Joseph Otting often referring to banks as the OCC’s “clients.”

Banks are furious, of course. How dare a regulator regulate them! But this isn’t about the banks. 

This is about it being the entire job of an agency to grease the skids for its “client” banks, and overriding their capitalistic free will by ramming through a regulation that makes a mockery of Republican orthodoxy. 

It’s certainly ironic to watch the “NO REGULATIONS” crowd suddenly impose one when their friends in the energy and gun industries are affected. 

It’s certainly ironic to watch the same crowd who want to refuse service to gay wedding couples suddenly get the vapors when it’s the mass-murdering gun industry in the crosshairs. Fox News had a breathless report back in July of last year on the emerging activism convincing banks to drop their gun clients. 

"Financial activism by banks is by far one of the largest emerging threats against Second Amendment rights," Philip Watson, founder of Washington Public Relations and a Second Amendment advocate, told Fox News. "The federal government allows the financial industry to receive vast amounts of federal funds; however, those exact same funds free up their balance sheets enough to discriminate and play politics."

Again, refusing to sell a cake to a gay couple is fine. Refusing to serve murdering gun industry and it’s “playing politics.” And indeed, that’s the talking point Republicans have used to justify this new regulation. “Business lending decisions should be based on creditworthiness, rather than politics or political pressure,” said Republican Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo. “I applaud Acting Comptroller Brooks.” 

Yet “political pressure and politics” are very much legitimate factors in any business’ decisions. It’s called “public relations,” and consumers are allowed to make their own commerce decisions based on how their values align with the people they do business with. It’s why gun manufacturers advertise on right-wing online forums and other politically friendly forums. It’s why businesses focused on sustainability advertise where liberals congregate. It’s why even trillion-dollar companies like Apple and Microsoft make a big deal about their own sustainability efforts. 

People want to feel good about the companies they do business with. And quite frankly, outside of the MAGA/Q world, people aren’t much thrilled about assault weapon manufacturers or environment-destroying frackers. Republicans don’t like that, pushing through this gross interference into the free market. 

Calling Republicans “hypocrites” is rote, boring, and ineffective. They don’t give a shit. But it’s yet another reminder that they lack even the barest semblance of a cohesive ideology. 

Like all regulations passed within the last six months (or so), the new Congress and administration has a chance to veto them with a simple majority vote. 

The Trump administration has rushed through a flood of last-minute regulations that the new Democratic majorities fully intend to review. This may be one of them. 

Beyond that, the banks will sue as the process in passing this regulation was rushed and likely flawed (remember which administration pushed it through, the most incompetent of all time). Interesting question: In that lawsuit, who would defend the regulation? The Biden administration certainly will have little interest in doing so. 

So in the end, it’ll likely be all for naught—a last-minute gift to the gun and extraction industries that will end up being nothing more than a cruel mirage, as real and substantive as the GOP’s supposed fealty to “free market principles.”

Fervent Trump supporter and My Pillow CEO Michael Lindell was pictured Friday entering the White House with a document that seemed to outline a path to declaring martial law along with potential personnel changes atop the nation's national security structure.

The multipage document was mostly obscured, but the picture tweeted out by a Washington Post photographer included phrases like “… martial law if necessary upon the first hint of any ...” and "Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting." The partial title gleaned from the photograph was "… Be Taken Immediately To Save The ..."

A close-up of the document suggests it also appears to reference invoking the Insurrection “Act now as a result of the assault on the ...”

Patel is a staunch White House loyalist who “previously worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R.Calif.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and as a staffer played a key role in helping Republicans discredit the Russia probe.”

If nothing else, the sighting proves that Trump’s coup scheming continues—to what end, we don’t know. Also:

jyosim writes: Professors at the University of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 professors there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Professors feel the app is akin to a "police state." "The university spokesperson said that administrators had heard that some professors 'would simply refuse to teach an in person class if that's what they were supposed to be doing,' so they added the feature, which rolled out this week as spring classes began," reports EdSurge. An email was sent to all students on Monday that encouraged them to use the app if they saw any 'inconsistencies' in course delivery." In response, Daniel A. Smith, chair of the university's political-science department, wrote in a letter: "Emulation of police states is not a good look for a university devoted to the education of democratic citizens. What sort of message does this send to our students?" On Twitter, professor Lisa S. Scott said she was "more than a little disturbed" by the move, adding, "@UF do better. We've been working our asses off for you through all of this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, doesn't start his new role until February, but he's already prepping the company to take on Apple's M1 chips. From a report: The Oregonian, a local newspaper in Oregon where Intel maintains a large presence, reports that the chip maker held an all-hands company meeting yesterday, and Gelsinger attended. "We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino" makes, Gelsinger reportedly told Intel employees. "We have to be that good, in the future." Intel has been facing increased competition from both Apple and AMD recently. Apple announced its transition to its own silicon back in June, calling it a "historic day for the Mac." The transition has gone well, with M1-based Macs providing impressive performance and battery life compared to existing Intel-based Macs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Just coming down the wire, Reuter’s reporter Jan Wolfe says that the National Rifle Association has “filed a petition for bankruptcy.” Thoughts and prayers. In a “Letter from Wayne,” meaning NRA top dog Wayne LaPierre, the beleaguered and dubious NRA chief said that the bankruptcy is “a restructuring plan that positions us for the long-term and ensures our continued success as the nation’s leading advocate for constitutional freedom—free from the toxic political environment of New York.”

Thoughts and prayers, buddy. Wayne must be talking about all of the New York-based investigations into his truly sketchy management of NRA monies over the past few years. Things like LaPierre and his wife’s interest in using NRA money in order to potentially purchase a $6 million “luxury mansion” in Westlake, Texas. This filing has been coming for some time as the gun-loving NRA has reportedly been bleeding tens of millions of dollars for years now. Reports of cut backs to free water and coffee for employees at their Virginia headquarters goes back to 2018.

Thoughts and prayers, guys.

The Trump administration has not marked the great ascent of the NRA as leadership and others had hoped. Internal strife surrounding the misuse and mismanagement of the nonprofit’s funds has been one of the ugly revelations over the past couple of years. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, it quietly came out that the NRA had already been laying off dozens of employees, weekly, for many months—possibly hoping not to alarm anyone into paying attention to how dire their financial situation had become.

As the year has progressed, the only stories coming out about the NRA unconnected to their financial troubles were connected to the abject hypocrisy of the organization itself. After decades of painting the idea of background checks as an attack on personal privacy, it turned out the company was selling off their memberships’ personal data to Trump’s pay-to-play friends.

In LaPierre’s letter to membership, he makes it clear that the hope here is to reset the clock, get out from under the investigations into possibly criminal and fraudulent financial practices in New York, and begin again in Texas. “We are DUMPING [sic] New York, and we are pursuing plans to reincorporate the NRA in Texas.”

If karma exists, the NRA has earned this.

Updated on January 15, 2021 at 1:52 p.m. ET

Mike Pence publicly defied the president once in four years, and for that solitary show of independence, his own political future could be all but finished.

The vice president’s swift journey from acolyte to outcast was head-spinning. This is someone who would pause after mentioning Donald Trump’s name during an address so that the audience had time to clap—and who would then stand silently at the lectern when it didn’t. Editing Pence’s speeches, aides would cut references to Trump when they didn’t believe there was any reason to mention him. Reviewing the changes, Pence would take his Sharpie and add Trump’s name back in, a former Trump-administration official told me.

But Pence will see no reward for his fealty, or for his actions on January 6, when he resisted pressure from Trump to toss out the election results. The springboard to the Oval Office that so many vice presidents have used is gone. Not only has Trump’s base turned on him, but Pence is complicit in the Trump administration’s most egregious actions.

Lashing himself to Trump was a path to becoming president—the only path, really—for a man who has long wanted the job. As a lowly representative from Indiana, he talked privately with former Vice President Dan Quayle about how best to position himself for a White House bid, gaming out whether he should run as a member of Congress or as Indiana governor.

Imagining his next move is difficult. “The biggest and most obvious problem he has is he has to distance himself from the president, and when you’re vice president for four years, you can’t do that,” Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former aide to California Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, told me. Alternatively, “going into a crowded primary field [in 2024], he could say, ‘Hey, I’m the guy closest to Donald Trump.’” But after last week, he can’t do that either.

[David Frum: The man who pretended not to notice]

When Pence’s most memorable act is ushering in the Joe Biden presidency, the MAGA crowd becomes less a reliable following than a possible mortal threat. Spurred on by Trump’s remarks at a rally before the Capitol riot, some in the mob went looking for Pence. “Hang Pence!” they chanted, as they flooded the halls of Congress. Worried about Pence’s safety, federal agents have now surrounded his official residence in Washington, D.C., with chain-link fences and concrete barriers for extra protection. Any credit Pence gets for certifying Biden’s victory comes from people who probably wouldn’t vote for him anyway. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Whalen said.

Pence’s rise and fall is emblematic of that of so many people who tethered themselves to Trump with disastrous results. When he agreed to become Trump’s running mate, his career was in peril. He was an obscure governor facing a difficult reelection campaign. At the time, his national profile centered on a bill he’d signed that critics feared could be used to discriminate against the LGBTQ community on religious grounds. By putting him on the ticket in 2016, Trump rescued him from a potentially career-ending loss—a point that Trump hasn’t hesitated to make in private discussions with White House aides.

From the first, Pence worried about alienating a thin-skinned president in constant need of validation. He stayed on message even when there was no message. James Melville, a former U.S. ambassador to Estonia, told me about a visit Pence made to that nation in July 2017. When Pence would huddle privately with aides, he’d invariably ask: “Were there any tweets? Did I miss anything?” Melville recalled. “I thought it was shocking and amusing” that Pence would be engaged in so much “hand-wringing over what the boss was saying.” Working under Trump, Melville said, was akin to “living with an alcoholic. You’re always waiting for the next disaster.”

My first exposure to Pence came during the 2016 transition, and I was immediately struck by his determination to bind himself to Trump. He’d agreed to an interview, but recited only talking points that ate our time—and revealed nothing. With his wife, Karen, sitting nearby, he stood up at the end and, with some sympathy in his voice, asked if he’d said anything that might prove useful. Not really.

Over and over, he gave Trump cover and vouched for him with the evangelical voters who were a crucial part of Trump’s governing coalition. He stayed when families were separated at the border and when the president pressured a foreign leader to find dirt on Biden. He stayed through the tweetstorms and tantrums and false claims of election fraud. “He tends to seek approval from something bigger and more powerful than himself,” Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who prayed and read scripture with Pence when he was in Congress, told me. “And in this case, it’s the president.”

[Read: A survival guide for the Trump White House]

Embracing Trump was always a gamble. As Brendan Buck, a former House Republican–leadership aide, told me, “There are no happy endings when it comes to Trump.” In this partnership, the president got more out of the bargain. Pence comes away damaged, while Trump, at least, got a vice president who ran a functioning operation.

Pence’s office was a corner of the Trump administration that actually resembled a working executive office. His staff didn’t turn over every three days. There was little public drama and, whatever you may think of his politics, a sense of mission. Career government officials with no love for the president told me that Pence was a fair intermediary who’d listen to their arguments. Joseph Grogan, who left his job as the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council in the spring, said that when people ask him who they should call at the White House with a question or problem, he suggests Pence’s office. “I tell them that that’s the only place you can really go right now, because they’re still working,” he said. Now that Trump is holed up in the White House nursing his grievances, Pence is, in some respects, stepping into the role of acting president. Yesterday, he went to the Capitol to thank the National Guard troops deployed to protect the building ahead of Inauguration Day—the sort of gesture a president would normally make.

Until the election’s grisly aftermath, Trump seemed positioned to become a GOP kingmaker who’d hold considerable sway over the political fortunes of any West Wing aspirants, including his vice president. (That is, if he himself didn’t run in 2024.) Now the party faces a reckoning. “Trump’s inexcusable behavior likely blew himself up politically, which may become a huge gift to the Republican Party,” said a former senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly. The official framed Pence as a casualty of Trump’s recklessness. His recent treatment of Pence showed “a complete lack of character.” What Trump was imploring Pence to do by rejecting the election’s certification was not “legal and not constitutional … It’s ridiculous.”

Yet Pence has no obvious place in GOP electoral politics even if his party repudiates Trump. Grateful though they might be that Pence honored the popular vote, independents and Never Trump Republicans have plenty of plausible alternatives when the 2024 primary season rolls around. Consistent and unapologetic critics of the president, such as Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, would most likely attract those voters. In the meantime, the Trump base is more likely to gravitate toward one of the president’s adult children, or maybe one of the two GOP senators who pushed to reject the electoral-vote count: Ted Cruz of Texas or Josh Hawley of Missouri. Pence was never a lock for the presidency, but now he simply has no lane left.

“The hardest core of the Trump crowd is going to turn on him—and Trump is going to make sure that they do,” Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee spokesperson, told me.

This week, Pence offered Trump one last act of service, rejecting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call for him to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and bounce the president from office. But come January 20, he’ll be in the same position as he was after the Capitol riot: out in the cold.

For four years, Donald Trump downplayed the risk of white-supremacist violence and denied that racial bias is pervasive in law enforcement. In a single, searing day, the assault on the U.S. Capitol exposed the price of both of those choices—and may have provided Joe Biden new political momentum for reversing direction on each front.

At once, the rioters demonstrated how much the threat of white extremism has metastasized under Trump, while the restrained police response vivified a racial double standard in policing. The attack could strengthen the case for systemic police reform, both through congressional action and a revival of Justice Department oversight of local police practices that the Trump administration essentially shelved. Representative Karen Bass of California, the lead sponsor of a police-reform bill that passed the House last summer, told me she believes that the lower chamber will approve a new version “within the first quarter” of 2021. “This was yet another example in the disparity of treatment between African Americans and others,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, told me. “This is yet another example of how police agencies viewed citizens differently.”

The attack could also make it tougher for congressional Republicans to resist the Biden administration’s expected efforts to dramatically increase enforcement against white supremacists through the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. “This isn’t just a Trump thing that goes away when Trump goes away,” Elizabeth Neumann, the former DHS assistant secretary for threat prevention under Trump, told me. “And this isn’t just a bunch of really crazy Trump people. This is something darker and deeper that has been around a very long time. We have aroused the sleeping giant … and we’re now going to be dealing both with [Trump’s] radicalized supporters and this white-power movement on steroids for the foreseeable future.”

Biden signaled his intent to invert Trump’s law-enforcement priorities when he unveiled his top Justice Department nominees at a press conference the day after the Capitol assault. When Biden introduced Merrick Garland, his attorney-general nominee, the president-elect pointedly noted that the Justice Department was formed to enforce the post–Civil War constitutional amendments ending slavery and promising equal rights under the law. The department’s founding mission, Biden said, was “to stand up to the Klan, to stand up to racism, to take on domestic terrorism. This original spirit must again guide and animate its work.” When identifying their priorities, Garland and Biden’s other top DOJ nominees pointed to the same two issues: tackling the threat of violent domestic extremism and confronting systemic racial bias in law enforcement.

The nominees bring unusually relevant credentials to each side of that equation. Garland, a federal judge, helped lead the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in the mid-1990s. Lisa Monaco, Biden’s nominee as deputy attorney general, served in Barack Obama’s administration as assistant attorney general for national security and his White House adviser on counterterrorism. The other two nominees Biden announced were selected from the heart of the civil-rights legal establishment: Associate-attorney-general nominee Vanita Gupta, another Obama alumna, is the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; Kristen Clarke, the nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, is the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

[Zeynep Tufekci: Most House Republicans did what the rioters wanted]

Yet on both the white-extremist and policing fronts, the magnitude of the Biden administration’s challenge is formidable. The white-nationalist threat has been on “an upward trajectory” over the past four years, Neumann told me. Although white-supremacist organizations have always existed, and their efforts accelerated after Obama’s election as the first black president, Trump acted as a “kind of an accelerant,” she said. “There was already a fire, and he was adding fuel to it. He was expanding the number of people who were participating in the extremism.”

Greg Ehrie, a former section chief of the FBI’s domestic-terrorism operations center and now the vice president for law enforcement at the Anti-Defamation League, told me that throughout Trump’s presidency the white-nationalist movement has also felt more comfortable stepping out into public. “It is certainly growing in identified numbers, people who are coming out openly and saying ‘I believe in it,’” he said. “You are seeing people become emboldened.” At the same time, extremist groups are solidifying their organization, with more clearly identified leaders and something more akin to a chain of command. “Their structure is actually codifying itself, which is a really scary development,” Ehrie added.

While experts I spoke with agree that Trump’s rhetoric has dangerously encouraged these groups, they disagree on federal law enforcement’s response. Ehrie said federal agencies have made “some inroads” in combatting them. But others told me that the catastrophic attack on the Capitol made clear that the government has not treated the threat with sufficient gravity—either because of Trump’s own downplaying of any problem or because of cultural and racial blind spots in their own ranks.

“From what I watched, they made changes, they adjusted, but they were a little too slow, in my book,” including DHS, said Neumann, who resigned last year and publicly supported Biden during the election. “I still wonder, based on what happened on January 6, if there is kind of an unconscious bias—an assumption that a bunch of white guys like to yell at each other on the internet and play dress-up with militia [gear] but there are only a handful of them that we actually have to worry about.”

Many African American leaders see nothing to wonder about. Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights advocacy group Color of Change, argues that federal law enforcement puts much more emphasis on monitoring and pressuring racial-justice advocates than white nationalists. Under Trump, federal officials “have treated NFL players who kneel as national threats and white men who are talking about overthrowing the government with guns as patriots,” Robinson told me.

“I don’t think they’ve dealt with it at all,” said Bass, referring to the Trump administration’s approach to white nationalism. “I don’t think they consider it a problem, and that’s a part of our history.”

Despite the heroism of individual officers resisting the mob, the Capitol Police’s strikingly muted response—as well as the presence of law-enforcement personnel from around the country among the rioters—raises a larger, often unspoken issue: the presence of white-nationalist sympathizers in law enforcement. The force’s reaction “brings [up] a lot of questions” related to whether there were “people internal to the [Trump] administration, within the Capitol Police, and others who were in collusion” with the attackers, Johnson, the NAACP president, told me. Adds Bass: “I think when all is said and done, you will find that [among] members of the Capitol Police, my Republican colleagues, and their staff, there was involvement at different levels and participation in what happened.” (Although no specific evidence has emerged, House Democrats have said they are investigating the possibility of collusion.)

More broadly, the lax response, as well as the decision to allow the rioters to leave the Capitol unmolested, dramatized in an unusually visceral way a key complaint from Black communities: that law enforcement treats white people differently in any kind of encounter—in this case, even an armed and violent attack on a foundation of the American government. The stark contrast between how the rioters were treated and how Black Lives Matter protests were handled last summer “further cements for people of color [that] America, for all of its good, has a long way to go in achieving its promises of equality under the law,” Sakira Cook, the Justice Reform director at the Leadership Conference, told me.

[Read: The inaction of Capitol Police was by design]

The Capitol riot could spur a new effort to overhaul police departments, including through Bass’s police-reform legislation, which the House passed in June without a single dissenting Democratic vote after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (The Senate did not take the bill up for a vote.) Among other measures, that bill would have banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants at the federal level; established a national registry of police misconduct; and scaled back the “qualified immunity” legal defense for officers accused of wrongdoing. Under Gupta and Clarke, the Biden Justice Department is certain to revive its oversight of local police departments through “pattern or practice” investigations of systemic bias, which can result in judicial consent decrees.

More contentious is whether Congress needs to provide federal law enforcement with expanded legal authority to confront domestic terrorists. Neumann and some other terrorism experts say yes, while many civil-rights advocates fear that law enforcement could turn such authority against minority communities. “Addressing white supremacy does not require creating a new statute,” Becky Monroe, who heads the Leadership Conference’s hate and bias program, told me. “It requires the will and investment in existing statutes and existing authority to ensure that these insurrectionists are held accountable.”

Robinson said that truly defusing white nationalism’s rising threat will require more than prosecuting direct participants—or even pursuing sympathizers in law enforcement. Instead, the incoming administration and civil-rights advocates must look at the broader range of institutions that extremist groups rely on to grow, including social-media companies that spread their message and financial institutions that process their fundraising efforts. “Some of the biggest, most profitable institutions have also played a role in getting us here, because they have looked at so many of the people behind these groups and they have not seen them as a threat,” Robinson said. “They see people that look like them, that look like members of their families, and they don’t take the threat seriously because it’s not targeting them.”

Neumann pointed to another dimension. Because extremists are relying so heavily on Trump’s unfounded claims about the election to mobilize support, stunting them will be extremely difficult unless more Republican officials publicly refute him. “The biggest thing that could help the scope of the problem is for the bulk of Republicans to come out and say, ‘The election was not stolen, Donald Trump lied, I was complicit in that lie, and I apologize,’” she told me. An internal federal intelligence bulletin disclosed yesterday by The Washington Post also warned about more violence if the lie about the “stolen election” isn’t dispelled.

The responsibility for confronting this mounting threat now falls to Biden and his team. The president-elect has not appeared particularly enthusiastic about imposing consequences on Trump for his role in the Capitol attack through impeachment, and many legal experts believe that he will resist pursuing criminal charges against his predecessor. But throughout the campaign and the tumultuous transition period, Biden has focused on racial inequities more consistently and forcefully than even many civil-rights advocates expected.

By demonstrating both the danger of white nationalism and the bias in policing, last week’s assault has not only elevated those issues even further, but also exposed their common roots. “At its core, police brutality against people of color and white supremacy … in the way we have seen it displayed by Trump supporters are part and parcel of the same thing,” Cook told me. “What we want members of Congress to understand is that to address both of these problems, we must deal with the root causes of inequity and racial discrimination in this country.” Amid the wreckage of last week’s right-wing insurrection, and the ongoing threats of more violence looming over next week’s inauguration, that assignment looks only more urgent.

Three of Donald Trump's closest advisers in the 2016 campaign and early White House days went all in on his post-election incitement, but are now trying to insulate themselves from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump's former national security adviser Mike Flynn, White House aide Steve Bannon, and longtime confidant Roger Stone—all of whom were ensnared in the Russia probe—resurfaced following Trump's election loss to vigorously promote his fraud lies. And even though none of them spoke at the Jan. 6 rally-turned-riot, they all worked in different ways to promote and build interest in the event, according to ABC News.

At a December 12 pro-Trump rally in Washington billed as the "Jericho March" and promoted by "Stop the Steal" movement—the lead organizers of the Jan. 6 rally—Flynn told attendees the country had reached a "crucible moment" and "there has to be sacrifice," according to ABC. "We’re in a battle," Flynn said, "for the heart and soul of the country." He also told the crowd that on a scale from 1 to 10, he thought the chances of Trump being the next president were “a 10.”

Attendees of the December event included members of the extremist Proud Boys group, who later clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters resulting in four stabbings following the rally. The so-called "Jericho March" returned to D.C. on Jan. 5 and 6, calling on “patriots, people of faith and all those who want to take back America” to travel to D.C. for two days of prayer and protest.

Bannon was also an avid supporter of the Jan. 6 rally, serving as a chief sponsor of the "March for Trump" group that helped organize the event alongside "Stop the Steal." Bannon's post-election rhetoric was downright gory. His "War Room" podcast was banned from Twitter after he imagined beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Chris Wray. 

"I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats," Bannon said. "You either get with the program or you are gone."

For his part, Stone riled up Trump cultists the night before the Jan. 6 rally, saying Trump's detractors wanted "nothing less than the heist of the 2020 election," adding "We say, No way!"

Now, all three men have kicked into overdrive to distance themselves from the Capitol attack.

A source close to Flynn told ABC News the retired general does not believe his words incited violence, and that he does not condone it, saying the riot was "the last thing we expected."

Who coulda known? That seems legit.

Bannon representatives said he would "never" call for violence—even after he did. "Mr. Bannon did not, would not and has never called for violence of any kind. Mr. Bannon’s commentary was clearly meant metaphorically."

Stone, who addressed attendees on the eve of the riotous rally and had been billed as a featured speaker on Jan. 6, said he had “no role” in fomenting the violence at the Capitol.

"I have no role whatsoever in the January 6 events as I never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport before 6 pm curfew. A careful review of my language of January 5 indicates that I played no role whatsoever in advocating violence or any inappropriate or illegal activity," Stone said in the statement.

Interesting. Stone, by his own account, seems to have been pretty meticulous about the language he used the night before the insurrection. 

The Justice Department Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) has released the final version of a draft report obtained by NBC News in October that points to top Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, including former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his deputy Rod Rosenstein, as “a driving force” in the Trump administration’s decision to carry out the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of children at the southern border.

The final report, which The New York Times reports is “largely the same as a draft,” confirms Sessions, Rosenstein, and DOJ officials carried out the inhumane “zero tolerance” policy with no mercy. “Our review found that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact that prosecution of family unit adults and family separations would have on children traveling with them and the government’s ability to later reunite the children with their parents,” DHS OIG said.

The final report confirms Sessions in particular as an evil, grinning participant in carrying out this human and children’s rights atrocity. As detailed in the draft version, when U.S. attorneys expressed concern about the ages of children being taken from parents and that some parents were not being immediately reunited with their kids after being prosecuted and receiving time-served sentences, Sessions instead encouraged continued separations.

“The notes further recorded Sessions telling the U.S. Attorneys, ‘we need to take away children; if care about kids, don’t bring them in; won’t give amnesty to kids; to people with kids’ [strikethrough in original],” the watchdog report said. Seeking asylum—for those who care about pesky things called facts—is legal immigration, by the way.

But others were also eager to push full steam ahead. The report said that following former DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s issuance of the May 2018 memo authorizing family separation, border agents were told to use spreadsheets to track their kidnappings because there was no database in place. “One senior CBP official who participated in Zero Tolerance Policy planning meetings stated that key stakeholders had pressured DHS to implement the policy in early May 2018 before identified deficiencies in [the database] were resolved,” the report said.

Oh, but some of these child-snatchers are now pointing fingers—when they’re bothering to say anything at all. The inspector general said that Sessions refused numerous times to be interviewed and said the office had no power to force him to submit to an interview because he’s a former official. Let’s get the new Democratic Congress to look into that, shall we? Gene Hamilton, a current DOJ official, meanwhile said to blame Trump and Nielsen, claiming the decision to implement zero tolerance “would be between Secretary Nielsen and the President, and not the Department of Justice.”

NBC News reports that following the release of the final watchdog report, Rosenstein issued a statement claiming regret. "Since leaving the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy,” he claimed. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better."

There’s no way that family separation could have been “done better” because it shouldn’t have been done at all, and any chance for the administration to have shown regret has long passed. In just one example of how there’s truly no remorse at all, the administration withheld additional contact information that could help reunite families that remain separated, disclosing it only last month after new attention was drawn to its inhumane policy. 

The Trump administration created this policy, the Trump administration implemented this policy, the Trump administration led by White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller thought it was fucking brilliant policy, and the Trump administration would have continued this policy into even more horrific numbers if it had not been for universal condemnation and a federal judge’s order. The Trump administration’s demise following a historic electoral turnout isn’t a time to move on—it’s a time to hold it accountable.

“The Inspector General's investigation makes it clearer than ever: Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein and the Trump administration willfully disregarded the lives of innocent children in their xenophobic crusade to criminalize migrant families,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “The trauma of thousands of migrant kids is on their hands. Everyone involved in this cruel and ill-conceived policy must be held accountable. I am committed to working with my colleagues and the incoming Biden administration to repair the damage at our southern border and restore humanity to our immigration policy."

House Oversight and Judiciary chairs also issued a statement following the report’s release, saying: “[i]t is imperative that we rectify these grave injustices, including by facilitating the reunification of these families in the United States as soon as possible and protecting them from detention and deportation. It is the very least we can do.” Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that have been assisting in reunification efforts also reiterated that separated families must be put on a path to citizenship.

“This was one of the worst human rights atrocities in American history,” America’s Voice Executive Director Frank Sharry told The Washington Post. “The full power of the state, with the support of the president and the Cabinet, was deployed to rip thousands of kids from their parents to deter them from seeking safety and freedom as refugees in America.”

Large majorities of Republicans are on board with Trump's war on democracy.

It’s not hard to spot Jacob Chansley in any image of the insurgent takeover of the Capitol building on Jan. 6. He’s the shirtless jackass wearing a horned helmet. The jackass who calls himself “Q Shaman.” The jackass who carried a spear into the Capitol. The jackass who wrote a note saying, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming,” before leaving it on Mike Pence’s desk in the Senate.

Chansley has become iconic for just how ridiculous the crowd pouring into the Capitol was on that day of insurrection. Not only has he succeeded in getting prison officials to feed him only organic food following his arrest, he has also secured St. Louis “super attorney” Albert Watkins to conduct his defense—that would be the same attorney who defended the gun-toting McCloskeys after they waved weapons at peaceful protesters walking through their tony neighborhood. Watkins is already making it clear what he wants for his client: a presidential pardon. After all, he argues, Chansley was only doing what Donald Trump asked of him. But Chansley—horned helmet, spear, threatening note and all—may actually be about to receive something that could be visited on a whole host of those who were with him that day: a felony charge of sedition.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, Watkins is singing the same kind of aggrieved song for Chansley that he did for the McCloskeys. His client, he says, was “invited” to come to Washington, D.C., and was only doing what Trump asked of him. “He invited his faithful,” said Watkins, “those who had been longstanding supporters of him and his cause, those who felt for the first time in their lives that their political voices were being heard.” 

If that sounds like Watkins is throwing the blame on Trump, the conservative attorney also made it clear that Trump is absolutely free to call for an insurrection any time he wants. “He’s the president. He can go wherever he wants with those that he invites.”

Watkins went on to claim that Chansley didn’t do anything violent, or even harm any property.

“He just walked in with the whole crowd that was walking in on the peaceful side of things.” That would be the peaceful side of things where the crowd had just gained access to the Capitol building by dragging police down the steps, beating them with iron pipes, then smashing their way into the building with a chunk of bike railing. That peaceful side.

As police tell their horror stories of being battered, kicked, hit with bear spray, and beaten with everything from flag poles to fire extinguishers, Watkins insists that many of the Capitol Police were “supportive of the protesters.” And that Chansley put up no fuss when reinforcements arrived to drive him from the Capitol.

Frighteningly, Trump could issue a pardon, not just for Chansley, but for everyone who carried his banner into the Capitol, tore down American flags, and smeared the walls with both blood and excrement as they went hunting members of Congress. On the other hand, federal prosecutors appear to have something else in mind.

As Politico reports, those prosecutors moved on Thursday to deny bail to Chansley, and in doing so they put down in court documents something that had not been officially said before that point. Prosecutors described the activity on Jan. 6 in terms that may seem familiar for readers of Daily Kos. 

Federal prosecutors on Thursday for the first time described last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol as a “violent insurrection that attempted to overthrow the United States Government” — and one they consider to still be underway.

Far from being a harmless goof, prosecutors describe Chansley as “an active participant in" and “the most prominent symbol of” this violent insurrection. They also make clear that Chansley intended to return to Washington, D.C. in an attempt to disrupt Joe Biden’s inauguration. 

“At this juncture in our Nation’s history,” wrote prosecutors, “it is hard to imagine a greater risk to our democracy and community than the armed revolution of which Chansley has made himself the symbol.”

The language used by prosecutors, and especially the use of the terms “violent insurrection” and “armed revolution,” makes it increasingly likely that the “Q Shaman” and others will face not just charges of unlawful entry or curfew violations, but a felony charge of sedition—punishable by imprisonment for up to 20 years.

Which doesn’t mean that Trump could not still pardon Chansley and others on his way out the door. After all, Trump has long made it clear that he regards personal loyalty to himself as far more important than loyalty to the nation. What better way to underscore that than by handing out passes to traitors?

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire. The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences. Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[A rejoinder to Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman.]

 

In a recent post, co-blogger Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman double down on their earlier claim that impeaching and convicting Donald Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol would violate his First Amendment rights. They recognize that the Senate isn't necessarily bound by the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on this topic. But they continue to insist that conviction would go against "established First Amendment rights."

In reality, it would do no such thing. As critics like Jonathan Adler, Andrew Koppelman, and myself pointed out in response to Blackman and Tillman's earlier post, established First Amendment law does not protect high government officials from being removed from their positions based on their speech. If it did, Trump would have violated the First Amendment himself on each of the many occasions when he fired a cabinet member or other high-ranking subordinate for expressing views the president didn't like. And if officials can be removed from their positions for such reasons, there is equally no First Amendment constraint on using the Senate's power to bar impeached and convicted officials from holding office in the future.

In my earlier post on this topic, I also noted some absurd and dangerous consequences of adopting the Blackman-Tillman position, and addressed concerns that my own view could lead to a dangerous slippery slope of its own.

In their most recent piece, Blackman and Tillman fail to address the fundamental flaw in their position pointed out by critics. But they do try to buttress their argument by citing the precedent of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. They are right to point out that one of the eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson targeted speeches in which he "attempt[ed] to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof." And it is also true that some of the senators who voted to acquit claimed that conviction on this article would violate Johnson's First Amendment rights.

But I am skeptical that this does much to help Blackman and Tillman's defense of Trump against impeachment today. As they also point out, many other members of Congress rejected the position that Johnson's First Amendment rights would be violated in any way by conviction. And this group is, on the whole, a far more impressive one than the coalition of white supremacist Democrats and sometimes corrupt Republicans who just barely managed to get Johnson acquitted (the 35-19 vote for conviction was just one short of the 2/3 majority required).

As Blackman and Tillman note, the pro-impeachment camp included such luminaries as Senator Charles Sumner (a longtime leader of the antislavery constitutional movement whose ideas underpinned the Reconstruction Amendment), and Rep. John Bingham, perhaps the single most important framer of the Fourteenth Amendment. If we're going to reason based on authority and precedent, I'll take Bingham and Sumner over Johnson's defenders any day of the week.

More generally, the narrow acquittal of Johnson is no longer seen in the positive light that many viewed it from the late 19th century to the mid-twentieth (when John F. Kennedy praised it in his book Profiles in Courage). Today, many (though, of course, not all) historians and legal scholars recognize that Johnson actually deserved to be convicted because of his efforts to sabotage Reconstruction and maintain white supremacy in the post-Civil War South. This was the broader issue underlying the specific details of the charges against him. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a  biography of Johnson has a helpful summary:

The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day. Johnson's real crime in the eyes of opponents was that he had used the power of the presidency to prevent Congress from giving aid to the four million African-Americans freed after the Civil War. Johnson's deep antipathy toward black people, not his view of the Constitution, guided his actions…

Johnson had opposed slavery because he thought it hurt the class of poor whites from which he had come. Blacks were to be freed but left to the mercy of white Southerners. His plan of action—to put whites back in charge in the South—set him on a collision course with the Radical Republicans, who believed that the South must be transformed to incorporate blacks into American society as equals….

Johnson opposed congressional measures adopted to try to help African-Americans become productive members of society with the dignity accorded to whites. He opposed black suffrage, land reform and efforts to protect blacks against the violence that Southern whites unleashed upon them after the war's end.

Johnson had repeatedly used his powers as president to undermine congressional efforts to protect the rights of recently freed slaves and other blacks in the South. His apparent violations of the Tenure of Office Act (the immediate target of most of the impeachment articles) were part of an effort to replace officials willing to implement Congress' laws with ones he hoped would be inclined to support his own efforts to sabotage them. Whether or not he violated a specific valid law (Johnson's defenders claimed the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional, a view eventually backed by the Supreme Court in 1926), Johnson had grossly abused his powers and richly deserved to be removed from office (for good discussions of the reasons why impeachment for technically legal abuses of power is permissible, see analyses by  Keith Whittington  and prominent conservative legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen).

This doesn't mean every single article of impeachment lodged against Johnson was justified. In my view, Article 10 (the one focused on his speech) was weak, and probably deserved to be rejected; in the end the Senate did not even vote on it. But Johnson's statements attacking Congress were much less dangerous and egregious than Trump's more recent ones. Among other key differences, Johnson's remarks were not made to a crowd with lots of known violent elements that were about to march on the Capitol; they also didn't come in the aftermath of a long history of justifying and praising violence by his supporters.

Be that as it may, the acquittal of Andrew Johnson was not a valuable precedent to be followed, but a shameful episode in American history, where Congress let a malevolent president get away with egregious abuses of power. It should not be used to help another malicious president get off the hook today.

 

 

When former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was tapped by Donald Trump to become his administration’s first secretary of state, the only positive thing anyone could say was that Tillerson was someone who had some knowledge of the world. Tillerson is a crumb bum. But he does have thoughts articulated around what he believes are clear goals. We vote in order to have people other than Tillerson in positions to make national security and globally important political advisory decisions. The bar, of course, was set so low with Trump as president that having anyone not named Trump, Kushner, Bannon, or Miller in any position seemed to be a step up. That being said, Tillerson’s interests in being Trump’s secretary of state were closely tied to his fossil fuel view of the world and world politics. After he was fired by Trump, a steady stream of stories leaked out about Tillerson describing Donald Trump as something of a lazy moron. None of those stories were surprising.

In all of the hullabaloo of the past week’s events—insurrection and attempted coup and all—an interview with Tillerson for Foreign Policy slipped by with little fanfare. In it, Tillerson gives his usual run through of trying to be as helpful to President Trump and the country as possible, but he also articulates some of his “frustrations” with Trump. Those frustrations include Donald Trump being an ignoramus, acting like an ignoramus, listening to other ignoramuses, and being an inscrutable ignoramus. Tillerson explained that one of the fundamental hurdles he had to overcome in communicating his global policy ideas to Trump was the fact that Trump’s “understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.” This might be the nicest thing Tillerson said about the president during the interview.

Tillerson went on to illustrate how he began his tenure trying to bring “four or five things I needed to talk to him about,” and very quickly comprehended that a victory was getting to talk to Trump about two or three things. This gave way to Tillerson realizing he needed to bring visual aids like charts or images. “If I could put a photo or a picture in front of him or a map or a piece of paper that had two big bullet points on it, he would focus on that, and I could build on that.” We knew this but man, what a bummer. Asked how Trump made informed decisions if it was so difficult to make him informed, Tillerson said he didn’t think Trump made many “informed decisions.”

Another issue Tillerson said he faced was that the many handlers (and possibly Fox News) would get to the president before Tillerson met with him, filling him with fact-free opinions and information. Having a conversation with someone who believes things that aren’t real makes for a difficult discussion. Asked about Trump’s friendliness towards authoritarian leaders and antagonism towards allies, Tillerson said he couldn’t tell you what was going on in Trump’s mind. But, as Tillerson went on to explain, nothing ever panned out. We are in no better place with Russia or with North Korea, our issues with China have only become exacerbated, and our relationship with Turkey is even more messy.