James.galbraith

Just a week ago, news broke that Donald Trump had called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and attempted to threaten him into “finding” enough votes to “recalculate” the results of the 2020 election. That blatant attempt at election interference was enough to generate calls for Trump to be be impeached, again—days before he went out and incited his followers into conducting a violent attempt to overthrow the government. But almost from the moment the attempt to extract votes from Raffensperger hit the news, people began wondering what other calls were out there. Because of course there were other calls.

Now it turns out that it’s not even necessary to move to another state to find one of those calls. The Washington Post is reporting that Trump called Georgia’s lead investigator for voter fraud a week earlier, and told him he could be a “national hero” if only he just happened to find some fraud that favored Trump. The call came in the middle of an audit of mail-in ballot signatures in Cobb County, which had been instigated at the request of Trump’s campaign.

Twitter has finally banned Donald Trump for “glorifying violence,” in part by promoting unfounded election conspiracies that incited a Republican mob to a deadly terror attack on the US Capitol building this week.

But Trump wasn’t alone.

Lots of Trump-Republicans used Twitter to spread lies about the election, and more generally, divide the country with over-the-top, inflammatory rhetoric. Chief among them: Trump White House and campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany.

Now that Trump is banned, will Kayleigh McEnany be held accountable for her over-the-top tweets and retweets?

Let’s take a look at a few of McEnany’s Twitter musings since election day, 2020.

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That Democrats are stealing the election:

Some unfortunate foreshadowing:

Democrats have “unleashed a beast” because Biden won the election (she retweeted this):

Inflaming Republicans with extreme rhetoric:

Spreading the lie that the election was stolen by Democrats:

Read the rest of my article over at my new Substack, CyberDisobedience.

The post Twitter banned Trump, Kayleigh McEnany should be next appeared first on AMERICAblog News.

January 6, 2021, should have been a day of celebration of American democracy—of a cherished U.S. tradition of peaceful transfer of presidential power, and historic wins for Democrats in the Georgia Senate runoff election. That morning felt particularly celebratory for Black Americans. Thanks in large part to their intense engagement in the runoff race, Georgia elected the first Black Democratic senator from a former Confederate state in Rev. Raphael Warnock. His victory and that of Jon Ossoff clinched Democratic control of the Senate, with a tie-breaking vice president, Kamala Harris.

But, that afternoon, jubilation gave way to shocked sadness when a group of mainly white insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to stop the will of 81 million voters and 306 electors for President-elect Joe Biden. Rioters displayed the Confederate flag and other white supremacist symbols—including a noose—as they trampled grounds where the people’s business is supposed to be done.

The emotional whipsaw of Wednesday’s events had another, deeper resonance for Black Americans, whose political history has been defined by the long, tidal rhythms of Black advancement followed by white backlash—one that the United States seems destined to relive, over and over. Donald Trump rose to political prominence on a “birther” lie about Barack Obama and Tea Party backlash to our first Black president. Even as Trump has been disgraced for his role in inciting this week’s insurrection, his legions of angry supporters and the 147 House and Senate Republicans who voted to overturn presidential election results, based on lies of fraud, ensure that whitelash—the inevitable portmanteau to describe those who cannot accept robust pluralism—will endure for some time.

Will America ever be able to break this cycle, and what will it take? In the darkness of this week, we should not lose sight of what the Georgia results reinforced: the power of myriad voters, especially Black ones, to make American democracy work better for everyone.

Whitelash is an old American ritual, one my own family has lived. My great-grandfather Herschel V. Cashin, ran for the Alabama legislature in 1874, in an election in which white supremacists shot at Black people at the polls. He won, served two terms as a Radical Republican, and advocated especially for public education—one of 600 Black men elected to Southern state legislatures in that era. Reconstruction in Alabama and the South was powered by interracial alliances among newly emancipated Blacks, recently arrived Northern “carpet baggers” and moderate Southerners who had remained loyal to the Union. In Alabama, the alliance adopted the most progressive new constitution among the states of the former Confederacy—a new social contract that provided for universal equality, male suffrage among citizens and free public education for the first time.

But white supremacists intentionally destroyed Reconstruction in the state and throughout the South. With the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, a Republican-controlled Congress agreed to remove federal troops from Southern states, in exchange for Democrats accepting Republican Rutherford Hayes as the electoral winner in a disputed presidential election. Without federal protection of Black voters, the Ku Klux Klan and other secret societies became the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party. Resistance to Black participation in politics and lawmaking was systemic. Through violence, election fraud, economic reprisals and gerrymandering, Democrats retook control, and white supremacy was the central organizing principle of the party for nearly a century.

Grandpa Herschel never stopped fighting for the radical idea that Black people should vote—but also run for office and be thoroughly actualized citizens that help to build new public institutions that lift up all people. Like many other Black male Southerners, he participated in the “Black and Tan” wing of Republican politics, which warred with the Party of Lincoln’s Southern “Lily White” factions.

Bi-racial populism emerged in the late 19th century as a movement of farmers and workers demanded fairness from economic elites, particularly the Southern planter class that dominated politics in that part of the country. But the backlash continued. In the Alabama region known as the Black Belt, wealthy planters used violence, intimidation and outright doctoring of ballots to produce an absurdity: Blacks “voting” in overwhelming numbers for the party of white supremacy. Both the white working man and his industrialist bosses in other parts of the state grew tired of being disempowered by such fakery. Following the lead of Mississippi, South Carolina and other Deep South states, Alabama adopted a new constitution in 1901 designed to establish white supremacy by law rather than fraud or violence. It deployed poll taxes, literacy tests and other subterfuges to disenfranchise Black voters. In 1890, the Black electorate in Alabama stood at 140,000, but by 1906 only 46 blacks were registered in the entire state. The Democratic Party also unified whites with the regime of Jim Crow.

My father, Dr. John L. Cashin, Jr., grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, hearing about the greatness of Grandpa Herschel and Blacks holding office during Reconstruction, while he was being told to stay in his place. He vowed to finish Herschel’s work.

Black Americans returned en masse to Southern politics with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which came about because they mounted sustained, organized protest. Black people and their allies marched, rallied, boycotted, petitioned and filed lawsuits. The Voting Rights Act unshackled democracy, producing hundreds of thousands of newly registered Black voters in Alabama alone. My father founded the National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA) in 1967 so that new voters, especially in the Black Belt, could run for office and elect themselves. NDPA was inspired by, but strategically different from Stokely Carmichael’s Lowndes County Black Panther Party. Dad intentionally recruited liberal whites to form a powerful coalition to try to defeat Governor George Wallace’s white supremacy-identity dominance. NDPA’s platform was ahead of its time, committing to abolishing excessive tax advantages for industry, progressive income taxation, collective bargaining for farmworkers, racially balanced juries, equal educational opportunities in fully integrated school systems, environmentalism and abolishing capital punishment, among other progressive ideals.

Dad ran for governor in 1970 against Wallace on the NDPA ticket. He got 14 percent of the vote. He had no illusion of winning but wanted to give dirt-poor sharecroppers in the Black Belt a reason to register, go to the polls and vote the NDPA ticket for local candidates, including Black sheriffs, probate judges and school board members who won that year. Blacks returned to serving in the state legislature, and NDPA pressured the Democratic Party to drop its commitment to white supremacy and begin to recruit Black candidates.

Ultimately, Alabama and Mississippi—which had the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by the great Fannie Lou Hamer—elected more Black officials per capita than other states in part because of the early mobilization of NDPA and MFDP. But as with the backlash to and destruction of the first Reconstruction, those who feared a new multiracial politics that might unify working people and demand fairness from elites in turn suppressed, gerrymandered and dog-whistled, repeatedly, to hold on to power. Republicans, beginning in the 1960s, worked a realignment through a five-decade Southern strategy of white identity politics that stoked racial division. The South turned solidly red, and cynical division became national GOP strategy, culminating in the gross white nationalist appeals of Donald Trump.

Warnock’s victory is sweet validation for the idea, suggested by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, that generations of Black people pursuing their aspirations for freedom and believing in America’s ideals have been central to making those ideals true for all Americans. On the morning of January 6, the new day that will live in infamy, I was giddy with pride at what Stacey Abrams and a litany of grassroots organizations and organizers, particularly Black women, had accomplished in helping to turn Georgia blue for Democrats. After the feverishly contested Georgia gubernatorial election of 2018 in which Abrams was declared the loser, she founded Fair Fight to promote free and fair elections and voting rights everywhere. To help Warnock and Ossoff win, she distributed millions of dollars she raised nationally to local groups that knew how to mobilize.

The result: “Phenomenal” turnout, particularly in Democratic parts of the state, with majority-Black counties voting more Democratic in the runoff than they did in the general election. A multiracial coalition that also included Asian Americans, Latinos and white suburbanites, spurred by Black mobilizers and visionaries for what democracy should be, won and returned Georgia Democrats to the U.S. Senate for the first time in 16 years.

And those two Democrats—one Black, the other Jewish—have committed to an explicitly progressive agenda that prioritizes Medicaid expansion and building on the Affordable Care Act, major criminal justice reform, climate justice, clean energy and infrastructure, and restoring American democracy. Warnock proposes to repair the Voting Rights Act by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would reverse the damage done by Shelby v. Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court case that gutted the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that certain states “pre-clear” all proposed changes to voting qualifications and procedures with the federal government.

In recent years, and on January 6, many Americans worried that our democracy was sliding dangerously toward authoritarianism. White supremacists and nationalists now have prominent social media profiles, dedicated “news” outlets, and dark corners of the internet to perpetuate dogma and conspiracy theories with efficiency. Trump, as president of the United States, was at the center of this echo chamber.

Even as many Americans celebrate the Georgia election results and the dawn of a new presidential era, we can’t expect whitelash to cease. But as it has always been in the United States, empowering those most hungry for equality for themselves to participate in politics is the best way to ensure that American democracy will endure.

Over the last week, there have been many reasons to be enraged, disgusted, and horrified. But this may require a complete rest of the outrage meter.

The Pentagon has release heavily slanted timeline of events surrounding the Trump-incited insurrection on Wednesday. Only they didn’t call it an insurrection. Or an assault. Or an attempted overthrow of the American government by white supremacist forces organized, inspired, and directed by Donald Trump. It’s not a coup. It’s not even a failed revolution.

The Pentagon has renamed Wednesday’s events as “First Amendment Protests.”

The timeline—from the office of the Secretary of Defense—not only paints a violent assault on the nation’s, one in which men in tactical gear roamed through the House and Senate seeking hostages while others smeared human shit on the walls as “protests,” it give the event capital letters. First Amendment Protests. So don’t be surprised this is now the “official” name assigned to thousands of Trump supporters attempting a violent takeover.

What did this feces spreading assault on the nation have to do with the First Amendment? Well, it did deliver a powerful message to the media by destroying equipment, threatening reporters, and making it clear that they were next on the list to be hanged.

But the clear reason that this name is now getting slapped onto the event has nothing to do with the actual motivations of the insurrectionists or the theme of that day. Despite the “March for Trump” banners, the official name of the rally that morning was “Stop the Steal.” The lie that there had been significant election fraud was included in every invitation, every speech, and every statement encouraging the Nazi crowd to get out there and burn that Reichstag.

The sole reason that Pentagon — an absolutely, the Trump White House — is attempting this rename is not just to diminish what happened by calling them “protests,” but an attempt to link them to Trump being banned from Twitter and Facebook after the assault took place.

Updated on January 9, 2021 at 10:06 a.m. ET

The Republican Party’s “Flight 93” revolution tragically, but almost inevitably, came full circle this week in a storm of insurrectionary violence at the U.S. Capitol.

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, an anonymous author, eventually revealed as Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the “Flight 93 Election.” In his widely read essay, Anton insisted that a Democratic victory would change America so irrevocably that conservatives needed to think of themselves as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11—the ones who chose to bring down the plane to save the U.S. Capitol from al-Qaeda hijackers. Letting the Democrat win, in other words, would doom the country.

Trump supporters’ rampage on Wednesday represented a bracingly physical expression of that belief—and a bitterly ironic inversion of it. To save the country, in their eyes, the pro-Trump rioters assaulted the same building that the actual Flight 93 passengers died to protect.

The riot showed how the ominous tenor of contemporary Republican messaging could be fueling white conservatives’ extremism. For at least the past decade, GOP candidates and conservative-media personalities have routinely deployed rhetoric similar to the Flight 93 argument. Only about 40 hours before the insurrection, at a campaign rally hosting an enthusiastic, virtually all-white audience in rural Georgia, President Trump insisted that if Democrats won the state’s two Senate runoff elections this week, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.”

Trump’s speech that night didn’t attract as much attention as his incendiary remarks in Washington on Wednesday, which fueled the riot and led to calls for his resignation, removal, or impeachment. Nor did his closing argument in Georgia succeed: The elections there tipped control of the Senate to the Democrats.

[Read: Republicans meet their monster]

But Trump’s remarks showed how deeply apocalyptic imagery has pervaded Republican electoral strategy. When each election is presented as life-and-death for the country, it may not be surprising that more and more Republican voters and leaders want to maintain power by any means necessary. The claim that any Democratic victory will irrevocably reconfigure the nation taps into a deep fear among key components of the Republican coalition: that they will be eclipsed by the demographic and cultural changes that have made white people—especially white Christians—a steadily shrinking share of the population. When Republicans “say Democrats are a threat to America, I think they mean to America 1950,” the veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala told me. And in the years ahead, that vision of America will only diverge further from reality in a country where kids of color will soon represent a majority of the under-18 population, where a growing number of young people do not identify with any religious tradition, and where white Christians likely slip below 40 percent of the society.

In polling last fall by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, a larger share of Republican voters said that white people and Christians face significant discrimination in the United States than said the same about Black people and Latinos. In another national poll conducted earlier last year by the Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels, just more than half of Republican voters strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Fewer than one in six Republicans disagreed. (The rest were unsure.) Foreshadowing Republican voters’ embrace of Trump’s racist and baseless claims of election fraud in big cities with large Black populations, Bartels also found that three-fourths of Republican voters agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”

Trump may be uniquely determined to inflame and weaponize Republicans’ willingness to accept (or even welcome) antidemocratic means of maintaining power. But the breadth of anxiety inside the GOP coalition about the fundamental demographic, economic, and cultural changes remaking America strongly suggest that these party tendencies won’t disappear when Trump leaves the White House. If anything, they could intensify as those changes accelerate and as the incoming Biden administration—which has given prominent roles to people of color, LGBTQ people, and women—embodies all of them.

After all, Trump is not the only prominent elected official to hammer Republican voters with doomsday messaging, including arguments that Democrats want a socialist takeover of the country. “The choice in this election is whether America remains America,” Vice President Mike Pence declared at last summer’s GOP convention. In an article on the Fox News website just before the Georgia vote, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida declared that Democratic victories would unleash a “socialist assault on our nation.”

That was also the daily drumbeat from David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two Republican incumbents who lost this week’s Senate races. The two are buttoned-down multimillionaire former corporate executives, who in an earlier era are easy to imagine as standard-issue country-club Republicans who want to cut taxes and regulation. Yet in the runoff elections, each centered their race on the idea that they represented the last line of defense against a unified Democratic government that would allegedly destroy America. Loeffler robotically called her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, a “radical liberal” almost each time she mentioned his name in public, and said “we will lose America” if he won the election. On Monday night, Trump raised the ante on that argument: “There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat,” he said at the Georgia rally, in a distinct echo of the 1950s-era red-baiting politics of his former mentor Roy Cohn. “This party, this Democrat party is a Marxist socialist party—it’s a communist party.”

Such language has a long history in the Republican Party. It was especially popular from the 1950s through the early 1960s—particularly among the GOP far right—in the era of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. In a legendary 1950 California Senate race, Richard Nixon famously charged that his Democratic opponent, the representative and former actor Helen Gahagan Douglas, was “pink right down to her underwear.” In the early 1960s, Ronald Reagan, then a fading actor transitioning into politics, delivered a speech for the American Medical Association in which he warned that if Democrats passed an early version of Medicare for the elderly, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” In Reagan’s classic 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, he likewise warned that Democrats were morphing into something akin to “the labor Socialist Party of England.”

[Read: A Christian insurrection]

But both Nixon and Reagan mostly muted such rhetoric as they moved onto the national stage and as the pitched social conflicts of the 1960s receded. Although they may have harbored those beliefs privately, neither Nixon nor Reagan typically described Democrats in nearly as ominous terms as they did earlier in their career—or as Trump does now. “Even if, at certain points in their lives, Reagan and Nixon entertained thoughts like that, they wouldn’t share it,” notes the historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, whose four-book series on the modern conservative movement includes volumes on both Nixon and Reagan.

Nixon’s and Reagan’s choice to temper their rhetoric reflected the reality that in the early years of the Republican political revival after 1968, both men still needed to attract voters and navigate around institutions sympathetic to the Democratic Party, which had dominated national politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“In the case of Nixon, that apocalyptic vision was clearly something that lived in his heart,” Perlstein told me, noting that Nixon expressed it in his once-secret White House tapes. But Nixon was also “tactically and strategically shrewd.” He “prepared obsessively, was extremely concerned about how he came off to the public, and was working in a context in which the dominant political institutions were largely liberal—both the media and largely Congress.”

Though Reagan was a more ideological figure than Nixon, in the big, signature speeches of his presidency, Reagan talked about Democrats more in sorrow than anger. He sought to attract wavering Democrats by noting that he had once belonged to their party too—before, as he charged, the party evolved away from him. Once Reagan took office, “he understood that he was the institutional embodiment of this country that had to put a public face forward to the world that was respectable,” said Perlstein, whose latest volume is titled Reaganland. “So he understood that he believed things that maybe the public wasn’t ready for.”

Both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush often criticized Democratic policies and denounced their opponents as too liberal, but neither routinely portrayed the party as a threat to America’s fundamental traditions. Neither did the GOP’s presidential nominees in 1996 (Bob Dole), 2008 (John McCain), or 2012 (Mitt Romney).

The apocalyptic strain of Republican argument never entirely evaporated, though. It persisted in Newt Gingrich’s caustic portrayal of Democrats as the enemies of “normal Americans,” among conservative grassroots groups (particularly religious conservatives), and within the emerging conservative-media empire, led at first by Rush Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts in the late 1980s and by Fox News starting about a decade later. In 2010, the Tea Party movement, which erupted after Barack Obama’s first two years in office, revived charges of “socialism” against Democrats more forcefully than at any point since the 1960s, and merged them with the ongoing anxieties about cultural and demographic change that radiated through the social-conservative movement, talk radio, and Fox. That anxiety crystallized into the birtherism slur (promoted by Trump) against Obama.

Like an invasive plant species, the fevered Tea Party style steadily drove out the more restrained rhetoric deployed by both Bushes, Dole, McCain, and Romney. Trump has completed that transformation with years of messaging that’s portrayed his supporters—the virtuous “real America”—as under siege from a pincer attack by contemptuous elites above and dangerous minorities and immigrants below determined to steal “our country.” Changes in the electoral and media environment have reinforced this shift: Although in the era of Nixon and Reagan, Republicans tried to win voters not entirely in their camp, the party now operates in more of a closed circle. It relies primarily on overtly conservative media to mobilize a more homogeneously conservative electoral base. Those changes have not only allowed, but encouraged, Republicans to vilify Democrats more extravagantly.

Apocalyptic rhetoric has “absorbed all the available oxygen of the Republican ecosystem,” Perlstein told me.

[Adam Serwer: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy]

Democrats over the past decade have generally grown tougher in their portrayals of Republicans too, and no shortage of them have described Trump as a racist or a threat to American democracy. But even leaving aside the (considerable) extent to which he’s justified those labels, there’s still an imbalance: Democratic candidates, with the need to build coalitions that are more diverse both demographically and ideologically than the GOP’s, are much more likely to pledge to work with Republicans than to portray the party as endemically extremist. The equivalent to Republicans labeling Democrats as socialists or Marxists would be if the Georgia Senate candidates—much less Biden—described Republicans as authoritarians or fascists. In competitive races, that simply does not happen.

This week’s outrage is not likely to dissuade Republicans from using Flight 93–style arguments, because Trump has changed the party’s electoral incentives in a way that pushes many (if not most) GOP candidates toward such inflammatory hyperbole.

Trump’s redefinition of the GOP as a vehicle for the white Americans most uneasy about racial and cultural change has alienated many previously Republican-leaning white suburban voters, even in previously Republican-leaning states—as this week’s Georgia losses painfully demonstrated to the party again. That means, to win elections, virtually all Republicans now need superheated turnout from the Trump base: white, non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical Christian voters. And that means Republicans of all stripes will feel pressure to continue portraying Democrats not merely as misguided or wrong, but as an existential threat to GOP voters’ lives—even as Wednesday’s riot captures how those alarms are exacerbating the greatest strains on the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.

While watching footage of the pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, many Americans noticed far less confrontation with the police than they saw during the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Here, senior science writer Maggie Koerth explores what the data shows about how right- and left-wing movements are policed.

On the same day that Donald Trump sent his followers to capture the Capitol and threaten the lives of lawmakers in an attempt to overthrow the nation, COVID-19 killed over 4,000 American in a single day. The 4,100 who were tallied at WorldOMeters by the end of Wednesday was, by far, a new record. That record held all the way until Thursday, when 4,200 died. Thursday also brought 261,000 new cases in a single day, also a new record.

As Trump focuses on nothing but encouraging violence and protecting his own fading power, it appears that the federal government is giving zero attention to the crisis that has now killed 375,000 Americans. Nothing is being done to address the inadequate testing. Nothing is being done to provide guidance on the increased need for masks and social distancing. Nothing is being done to address the stumbling efforts to roll out vaccines. Nothing is being done to address bulging hospitals. Right now, the results of a New Year surge, on top of a Christmas surge, on top of a Thanksgiving surge are becoming clear. And those results are written in blood.

Numbers at the COVID Tracking Project are a little different … but not particularly better. They also have the nation with record levels of new cases, record levels of daily deaths, and a level of testing still far below where it was before the holidays. But most of all, they show coronavirus-related hospitalizations continuing to go up at an almost unbelievable rate. States from Alabama to Wisconsin are at record levels of hospitalization … and there aren’t many exceptions in that sequence. 

It’s difficult to single out a specific “hot spot” in a nation that’s at red-hot levels of disease almost everywhere. However, two of the states that were hit hard in the summer, Texas and Arizona, are again shuffling to the front by almost any statistic. ABC News calls Arizona the “hottest hot spot” as the almost 10,000 new cases and 300 deaths there on Thursday are terrifying on a national level. But it’s more than just a bad day for the state.

“The state currently has the highest seven-day average of COVID-19 infections per capita of any region in the world, based on Johns Hopkins University data.”

Where possible, it’s infinitely better to assist patients in breathing by providing an enriched level of oxygen rather than through intubation. Intubation is horrifying, debilitating, and difficult to maintain for an extended period without causing damage to the patient. It’s also much more difficult than giving assistance through oxygen. 

Arizona may be topping world charts, but it’s not just the United States being hit by the latest surge. Hospitals are full across the nation of Lebanon. The fast-spreading new variant continues to literally plague London. 

Meanwhile, distribution of vaccine continues to lag. As The New York Times reports, small numbers of doses have been thrown away several times as vaccination programs haven’t been able to unite vaccine with those who need it. Hundreds of doses have been unused in freezers even as front-line workers and elderly patients go without. Much of the confusion comes from a single reason: Without federal guidelines on how the vaccine should be distributed, the rules have come down to states, counties, and cities—some of which have set conflicting regulations. 

There has been some good news. Pfizer has indicated that their vaccine appears to be effective against the new fast-spreading U.K. variant. This likely also applies to the Moderna vaccine, which targets the same spike protein.

But the urgency of getting vaccines out and getting the virus load down is being made ever more critical as variants appear. Laboratory studies have already shown that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can continue to spread, and perhaps spread more effectively, even if the spike protein is altered so much that current vaccines no longer work. Another new, more contagious strain is spreading in—and from—South Africa.

In the last week, a coronavirus task force report warns that there may be another fast-spreading strain … in the United States. And that report makes it clear that vaccines need to be given now rather than later.

"Do not delay the rapid immunization of those over 65 and vulnerable to severe disease; recommend creation of high throughput vaccination sites with use of EMT personnel to monitor for potential anaphylaxis and fully utilize nursing students. No vaccines should be in freezers but should instead be put in arms now; active and aggressive immunization in the face of this surge would save lives."

The Pentagon has named the first half of a panel that will spearhead the renaming of bases that honor Confederate leaders, and the list includes a White House liaison who oversaw the purges of major Pentagon advisory boards.

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller on Friday named four members to the panel, which was established by annual defense policy legislation that President Donald Trump attempted to sink in part over his opposition to renaming bases.

Chief among Miller's appointees is Joshua Whitehouse, the White House liaison to the Defense Department. In late November and early December, Whitehouse oversaw the firing of members serving on expert advisory panels — the Defense Policy Board and the Defense Business Board — and the installation of numerous Trump loyalists in their place.

Miller's three other appointees are Earl Matthews, a former acting Army general counsel, Ann G. Johnston, the acting assistant secretary of Defense for legislative affairs, and White House official Sean McLean.

The remaining four members of the eight-member panel must still be appointed by the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) each will appoint one panelist.

The panel is part of a mandate, laid out in the National Defense Authorization Act for the Pentagon to rename 10 Army bases that honor Confederate leaders and remove other symbols or honors to the Confederacy within three years. The effort mirrors an amendment adopted in the Senate pushed by progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Despite bipartisan support in the House and Senate for removing racist relics in a year of racial upheaval, Trump opposed the effort. After months of threats, the president vetoed the defense bill due to, among other things, his opposition to renaming the bases, which he likened to rewriting U.S. history. Lawmakers overrode Trump's veto.

The legislation mandates the removal of Confederate names, symbols, monuments and other honors from military property — including bases, buildings, streets, ships, aircraft, weapons and equipment — within three years. The bill exempts Confederate grave markers from the review.

The commission is charged with developing criteria for identifying Confederate monuments and recommending procedures for renaming the property and gathering input from local communities.

The panel isn't explicitly tasked with coming up with new names for bases, though it could do so or defer to the Army secretary or Defense secretary.

A final report is due by Oct. 1, 2022, outlining property that must be removed or renamed, and the Pentagon will have until early 2024 to carry out the plan.

CHICAGO — Rep. Mary Miller served less than a week in Congress before moving Illinois Democrats to call for her resignation after she referenced Adolf Hitler in a speech not long before Donald Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

“She’s been on this earth long enough to know that invoking the beliefs of Hitler as being right in any respect is inappropriate and wrong. It’s wrong enough that she should not be in Congress,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in an interview.

During a rally for the conservative Moms for America, Miller, an Illinois Republican said conservatives would lose unless "we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”

Miller, the wife of Illinois GOP state Rep. Chris Miller, issued a statement Friday saying "I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused" and she "[regrets] using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history." But she blasted critics for “intentionally trying to twist my words.” Miller spokesperson Erin O’Malley considered an interview request with the congresswoman Friday but didn’t respond further.

But Schakowsky, who is Jewish and serves in House leadership, found Miller's statement lacking. The audience she was addressing, Schakowsky said, “is precisely the kind of crowd that I think would hear it and hear it as an affirmation of Hitler and that is dangerous.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Iraq War veteran, said Miller should resign and be replaced with “someone who better understands the sacrifices our brave service members made during World War II.” Illinois' Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who also is Jewish, called Miller’s comment at the rally “disgusting.” And Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the first Republicans to press for Trump's removal from office after Wednesday's riots, called the Hitler comments “garbage.”

When Congress reconvened after Wednesday's chaos, Miller voted to object to Arizona’s Electoral College votes.

Even if Miller doesn't resign, she may be forced out of Congress anyway after the redistricting process fires up later this year.

Illinois is expected to lose one of its 18 congressional seats in the upcoming redistricting process as the state’s population has fallen relative to others. And there's a good chance the remap doesn't bode well for Miller: She lacks seniority against GOP Reps. Rodney Davis and Mike Bost for conservative seats. Now her words have further alienated the state's power structure, where Democrats control both houses of the Illinois Legislature and the governor's office.

In her Friday statement, Miller said she has "been in discussion with Jewish leaders across the country" but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and several Jewish organizations also condemned Miller’s comments.

Miller’s spokesperson didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether her boss had tried to bridge things with members of the Illinois delegation. Schakowsky said she didn’t know about Miller's apology until it was mentioned by POLITICO. The governor hasn’t heard from Miller either.

Miller initially tried to tweet out apologies for her comments at the rally. She deleted one and a follow-up drew scorn from Twitter users.

The freshman Republican represents a large, conservative district in southern Illinois that was previously held by John Shimkus, who retired and endorsed Miller.

Shimkus, who was critical of the assault on the Capitol, swerved around criticizing Miller directly when a local radio station asked about the comments during an interview. "I was disappointed," Shimkus said. "Proverbs over Hitler” is a better way to to tell a story, he added.

Leading up to November's election, Miller made it clear she was a Trump supporter and showed off pictures of her and her husband meeting Trump in the White House.

After coasting to victory in November, Miller was asked if she had a message for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats. Miller said, “I call them a club of kooks.”

Miller isn’t the only freshman drawing scrutiny for her far-right stands. House GOP leaders disavowed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia before she was even elected because she’s embraced QAnon conspiracy theories and posted racist videos on Facebook.

Anyone who watched the disturbing events on Capitol Hill and President Donald Trump’s outrageous role as ringleader of the riot, must comprehend a crucial and terrifying fact: The president of the United States is unhinged and a threat not only to democracy, but to our survival. The danger is so acute that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is actively looking for ways to prevent the “unstable president from … accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike."

Unfortunately, under existing policy the only sure way to safeguard the nuclear arsenal from an unstable president is not to elect one. Once in office, a president gains the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, Trump can unleash hundreds of atomic bombs, or just one. He does not need a second opinion. The Defense secretary has no say. Congress has no role.

As a nation, we need to ask ourselves: Why are we taking this risk? Do we really think that Trump is responsible enough to trust him with the power to end the world?

But here’s the even bigger question: Do we really think any president should have the godlike power to deliver global destruction in an instant? By now, it should be clear that no one person should have the unilateral power to end our civilization. Such unchecked authority is undemocratic, outdated, unnecessary and extremely dangerous.

It’s time to get rid of the nuclear football. It’s no longer necessary, and its very existence is a danger to our national security.

How did we get here? It started 75 years ago, when President Harry Truman saw the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and determined not to use the atomic bomb again. To him, that meant keeping it out of military hands. So Truman declared that no more atomic bombs could be dropped unless he personally authorized it. By doing so, Truman set the dangerous precedent of one-person control. Atomic bombs became “the president’s weapons” and sole authority was reinforced as both the United States and the Soviet Union deployed ballistic missiles able to span the globe in 30 minutes or less.

As a result, for the past five decades, every president has traveled with a briefcase known as the “nuclear football” containing the codes that will allow the president—on his sole authority—to order the launch of the nuclear arsenal. Yet the awesome ability to launch hundreds of thermonuclear weapons in mere minutes came with grave dangers. Would any president be able to make a wise decision under such crushing time pressures? What if it were a false alarm? How would the president know? And what if the president was mentally unstable?

We came close to blundering into nuclear war several times during the Cold War. False alarms, in particular, are a real and growing concern. Today false alarms are even more likely because our weapons and warning systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks like the recent SolarWinds hack by Russia. If the president launches nuclear weapons in response to a false alarm, he would start World War III—by mistake.

Clearly, Trump’s blatant efforts to undermine democracy and disenfranchise millions of voters show an extreme lack of judgment and inability to promote the public good. Trust Trump with the bomb? Hardly.

And yet we have entrusted him with sole authority for four long years. The fact that he had not chosen to use nukes does not mean it was a good idea to give him this unilateral power in the first place. It wasn’t. And if we are lucky enough to survive the next two weeks and hand that power to a much more trustworthy president, that does not mean that we no longer need to fix this problem.

As much as we might hope, we cannot assume that we will never have another president as unqualified and unhinged as Trump. It is tempting to think that Americans have learned a lesson and will not repeat this mistake. But we cannot rest the fate of the world on such a fantasy. There are numerous politicians who are right now competing to be Trump’s political heir. Trump himself could possibly run again, and his children have political ambitions.

Trump is not the first president to trigger these concerns. There is always some chance that a president, at the moment it matters, might be delusional (like Trump), drink to excess (like Richard Nixon), or engage in some other activity that could cloud his or her judgment. Presidents, like all of us, make mistakes.

Luckily, we don’t need to take such risks. It’s no longer necessary to make a nuclear use decision quickly, and here’s how President-elect Joe Biden can get there.

First, once in office, Biden should announce he would share authority to use nuclear weapons with a select group in Congress. He should also declare that the United States will never start a nuclear war and would use the bomb only in retaliation.

Second, to make that pledge more credible, Biden should retire the land-based ballistic missiles that are stationary and more vulnerable to be taken out in a first strike—which could force a president into a quick “use-them-or-lose-them” decision. These missiles are not needed for deterrence, which is ensured by survivable submarine-based weapons. We can and should get out of the “use-them-or-lose-them” mindset.

On Jan. 20, if all goes well, the nation and the world can breathe a giant sigh of relief. Once Biden is sworn in as president, the nuclear football will be his. It will then be up to Biden to retire the football and ensure that we never again entrust the most powerful killing machine ever created to just one fallible human.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos submitted her resignation on Thursday after she believed that it would not be possible to remove President Donald Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, according to an adviser.

DeVos decided to step down from the Cabinet after learning that Vice President Mike Pence opposed calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to oust Trump from office before Jan. 20, the adviser said.

“Once that option was off the table, resignation was the only option,” the DeVos adviser said, saying that “this week was a clear line in the sand” for her.

The background: DeVos became the second Cabinet member to resign following the violent attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced her departure earlier Thursday.

In her resignation letter, DeVos told Trump that “there is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had” on the violent riots at the Capitol.

DeVos released the resignation letter Thursday after several reports that said Pence did not intend to pursue Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment. Pence has not publicly commented nor informed top congressional leaders of his position.

The DeVos adviser declined to say whether DeVos had spoken with Pence or Trump directly about the situation. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on DeVos' thinking on the issue.

What's next: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have called on Pence to use the 25th Amendment. Pelosi said Friday that they still hope to “hear from him as soon as possible with a positive answer as to whether he and the Cabinet will honor their oath to the Constitution and the American people.”

Some Democrats, who have called for Trump’s immediate removal from office, criticized DeVos and Chao for quitting rather than seeking to oust Trump from office under the 25th Amendment.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn accused the two Cabinet members of “running away from their responsibility” by resigning. “If they feel that strongly, they would stay there and wait on this meeting so they can cast two of the votes that are necessary to invoke the 25th Amendment,” Clyburn told CNN.

Parting words: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on Twitter that DeVos was “the worst Secretary of Education ever” and that DeVos would “rather quit than do her job to help invoke the 25th Amendment.”

DeVos responded on Thursday morning: “You know not of what you speak, @SenWarren.”

DeVos sent an email to Education Department employees on Friday morning sharing her Wednesday statement on the violence at the Capitol and a copy of her resignation letter from Thursday evening.

“It has been a privilege to serve America’s students alongside you, and I wish you nothing but the best as you continue to support our rising generation.” She signed the note “Onward!”

The answer to how the Capitol riots happened is right in front of us.

A white man, a smug grin on his face, hauls off a congressional lectern. Another sports a gun at his waist and carries zip ties, as if prepared to take hostages. Yet another places his foot on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk before stealing a piece of her mail and leaving a handwritten note: “WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN.”

Feces smeared throughout a federal building. Blood on the marble bust of a former president. Nooses on Capitol Hill. These are the images captured on January 6 when an enraged pro-Trump mob of hundreds flooded the gates of the US Capitol, America’s fortress of democracy.

And what they show is a brazenness, a fearlessness, an entitlement to conquer and destroy. These Trump fanatics could do whatever they wanted, take whatever they wanted, and no one would dare to stop them.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Win McNamee/Getty Images

An immediate concern from observers was how these insurrectionists successfully breached a federal building that has its own police force of more than 2,000. The pro-Trump mob was in control on the outside and inside. Despite public announcements of a plan to “take America back” on January 6 in DC, even from the president himself, Capitol Police had not initially requested assistance from the DC National Guard or DC police, according to the Washington Post — and they were outnumbered.

A mere 69 people were arrested in Washington on Wednesday night after the riot that temporarily halted the counting of Electoral College votes to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Just 69 were arrested on site despite widespread photos and footage of rioters bashing windows and scaling the walls of the Capitol grounds. In fact, in some video, officers can be seen holding the hands of the extremists, escorting them down steps, holding the doors of the Capitol open for them to leave, and taking selfies with them.

In comparison, police in Washington arrested 427 people between May 30 and June 2 last year, the peak of the uprising that came in response to the police killings of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The highest number of arrests, 289, came on June 1 when curfew was set at 7 pm. (This was the same day Trump authorized the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square to take a photo with a Bible outside of St. John’s Church.) But when curfew came at 6 pm on January 6, extremists were still roaming around downtown, and police didn’t make widespread arrests.

Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images

Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

While some were still wondering how this happened, others, especially Black people and other people of color, grew indignant watching the coup attempt unfold online and on TV, knowing that the whiteness of the insurrectionists acted as a shield — protecting them from being seen as a threat before, and while, they stormed the Capitol. For activists who endured violence at the hands of police when they were merely asking for them to stop executing Black people, this inequity is why they protested in the first place.

“White folks and white supremacists are treated with deference when they engage in violence and put the Capitol under siege,” Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, told Vox. “But activists who are attempting to elevate the sanctity of Black life are treated with disdain.”

There are many details that remain unclear about botched protocol on Wednesday — why the National Guard wasn’t activated sooner, why police reportedly had no intelligence on what the extremists had planned. But the fact that people are searching for answers as to why white people attempted to claim what they believed they own proves that white supremacy is functioning as it always has: unfiltered and out in the open.

White Americans were shocked by police violence in 2020 — but Black activists weren’t

As I reported in September, research from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that out of 7,750 Black Lives Matter protests across 2,400 locations across the country, 93 percent of them were peaceful — yet images of burning and headlines of looting were plentiful, with the president referring to the protesters as “thugs.”

New research from the organization compares the difference in law enforcement response between left-wing protests (anti-Trump, pro-Biden, Count Every Vote, Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE) and right-wing protests (pro-Trump, anti-Biden, Back the Blue, QAnon, Stop the Steal, etc.), finding that law enforcement was more than twice as likely to use force against liberal demonstrations between May and November. Researchers wrote:

Unlike demonstrations associated with the right-wing, which authorities attempt to disperse under 4% of the time, demonstrations associated with the left-wing are met with government intervention over 9% of the time. When authorities engage demonstrations associated with the right-wing, they use force nearly one-third or 34% of the time. Meanwhile, authorities use force in demonstrations associated with the left-wing over half or 51% of the time.

This evidence bears out anecdotally for the many activists and Black Lives Matter protesters who joined these demonstrations throughout the year. According to Abdullah, a December child-led protest she organized in Los Angeles resulted in violence from the police.

“The police were sicced on us and they made a beeline for our children,” Abdullah explained. “They tackled one of our 72-year-old elders and stomped on him, and then the people who came to his aid were beaten and arrested.” According to Abdullah, police arrested a trans sister involved in the demonstration and threatened to book them into men’s central jail. “There was no decency,” Abdullah said.

This scene was common in 2020 and looked similar to what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Photo roundups were packed with images of officers clad in riot gear, moving to corner Black Lives Matter protesters and put their backs against the wall. Other haunting images showed officers destroying the water bottles that protesters used to wet their eyes after they were tear-gassed, or colluding with far-right counterprotesters. In some instances, police kettled protesters to make arrests, a tactic of herding them into a confined space so they can’t escape. These images might have shocked liberal white viewers, but they were in line with what activists had been fighting against all along.

Michael B. Thomas/AFP via Getty Images

Scott Olson/Getty Images

While the number of Black Lives Matter protests has dropped since the summer, protests against wearing masks and false claims of election fraud, primarily attended by white people, have risen this fall — with little police interference. According to ACLED, police violence against Black Lives Matter protesters deters participants and slows mobilization. But protests remain stronger when they’re not disturbed by violence or the threat of it. According to the Washington Post, 14,000 protesters were arrested between late May and late June last year.

At “Stop the Steal” rallies — rallies largely attended by far-right pro-Trump supporters — the police fit in. They wave flags with thin blue lines to show support and vow to “Back the Blue”; the two groups are allies. Meanwhile, at Black Lives Matter protests, protesters speak against the actions of law enforcement, automatically positioning officers as a counterprotesting force, a force meant to upheld the status quo. This dynamic influences how police handle each group.

“Today’s insurrection and coup by hundreds of pro-Trump supporters is one more example of the hypocrisy in our country’s law enforcement response to protest,” Black Lives Matters Global Network said in a statement. “Make no mistake, if the protesters were Black, we would have been tear gassed, battered, and perhaps shot.”

Dismantling white supremacy is the path forward

As more information about what transpired on Wednesday comes to light, law enforcement officials still maintain that there was “no intelligence that suggested there would be a breach of the Capitol.” Yet it is widely known that the day was planned in plain sight on pro-Trump forums, so much so that participants wore merchandise labeled “Civil War January 6, 2020.”

What’s evident is that the organizers of Wednesday’s rallies were not taken seriously, as white extremists are often infantilized and given room to work out their feelings and blow off steam. We are told we need to listen to them, to try to understand their plight and psychology.

Meanwhile, for centuries, Black people have stated that this white entitlement — to take government, property, lives — is the very core of American identity. From the time colonizers brought enslaved people to America’s shores to Trump encouraging his supporters to walk down to the Capitol and be strong, this has been the case.

“I have a hard time believing anyone who says they are shocked by what took place in the Capitol on January 6,” University of Pittsburgh political science professor Keisha N. Blain told Vox. “We saw how whiteness works in the United States in 2015 when a white supremacist walked into Emanuel AME Church, gunned down nine Black people, and then was peacefully arrested and even taken for a bite to eat before being booked. Some people seemed to be shocked then, and every time another incident takes place, the same people express shock yet again.”

Following the riot, elected officials took to social media to express the sentiment that Black bodies would have perished if they stormed the Capitol. Michelle Obama called “seeing the gulf between the responses to yesterday’s riot and this summer’s peaceful protests and the larger movement for racial justice” painful. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris made it clear that there are “two systems of justice” in America. Biden voiced his concern on the matter of racism — BLM protesters would have been “treated very differently.”

“I have no idea what it will take for people to stop being shocked by how whiteness works in American society,” Blain said. “My sense is that too many people choose to be shocked because that response is easier than actually denouncing white supremacy and actively working to dismantle it.”

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

There is another striking image from the Capitol that captures this sentiment. In it, a white man holds a large Confederate flag in front of two portraits, one of abolitionist Charles Sumner, the other of John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery advocate and the seventh vice president of the United States. The juxtaposition of the portraits was stark. The battles they were fighting rage on today. And on Wednesday, it was clear who was still winning.

Online extremists started planning the chaos of January 6 months ago.

Ali Alexander, a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist, posted a video to YouTube on Christmas Day, urging people to come to Washington, DC, on the day that Congress would finalize Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency.

With a triumphant soundtrack, the video features President Trump at a rally declaring, “We will never give in. We will never give up, and we will never back down. We will never ever surrender.” It urges people to register to attend on a website, WildProtest.com, directing them to get to the Capitol building by 1 pm on the day of the event. The website even offered to help people find rides to get there.

This was just one of a slew of efforts from online communities that came together for the insurrection at the United States Capitol on Wednesday that left at least five people dead and many more injured. Many of these groups had been building enthusiasm online for such an event for years. They planned Wednesday’s event on social media and, as it was happening, gleefully livestreamed the destruction.

The events represent a turning point for the nation in its reckoning with the impact of online extremism. While misinformation researchers have warned for years of the growing influence of groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis, Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol was the clearest evidence yet that these movements threaten to destabilize American democracy.

It’s now undeniable that extremists online, ignited and enabled by Trump, have a real-world impact on US politics. And although Facebook and Twitter have taken unprecedented action to limit Trump’s accounts in the wake of this disaster, many of the president’s social media supporters have already established deeply intertwined networks of online communities that continue to encourage future chaos and sow doubt in the democratic process.

The Capitol mob began organizing weeks ago for the violence that occurred on January 6, planning inside conspiracy theory and far-right online communities on platforms like Parler and Gab. Groups that typically live in the darker corners of the internet stepped into the spotlight when they took the Capitol and broadcast the breach around the web.

For the many experts who have long warned that internet platforms had not done enough to curb extremism and misinformation, the event demonstrated how online radicalization could lead to violence and even threaten US democracy.

The disarray and violence in Washington on January 6 drew a big audience, too. More than 23 million people watched the event on cable news stations — it was the most-watched day in CNN’s 40-year history, averaging 5.22 million viewers — and millions more followed along online via livestreams. There were more than 4.6 million mentions of unrest at the Capitol between 12 am and 6:30 pm ET that day, according to Zignal Labs, a firm that tracks online misinformation. The number of mentions first spiked after Trump spoke at the “Save America” rally in front of the White House and then surged after the mob breached the Capitol.

While the tumult was stunning, it was not surprising. The groups that stormed Capitol Hill this week have long been active on platforms like Gab and 4chan, and more recently, they’ve adopted newer tools like the lightly moderated social media site Parler and the anonymous messaging service Telegram to organize. Some have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Still, some say these disparate online communities linking up and taking to the streets on live TV was inevitable.

“Online extremism isn’t ever just online,” said Nina Jankowicz, a researcher on online misinformation at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “We’ve seen so many examples this year of hate speech and incitement spilling over into real life. What happened yesterday is another extension of that.”

Years of online radicalization led to the Capitol riot

For years, members of movements like QAnon, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group — not to mention hordes of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists — have been allowed to accumulate and grow on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. While the mainstream social networks have taken action to restrict and even ban the groups, many had already achieved a significant level of organization, leaving critics to say that the crackdown came too late.

“Social media platforms, for years, have allowed their algorithms to boost disinformation and far-right organizing,” said Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz. “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”

He added, “The platforms are still reacting with Band-Aid policies instead of the surgical procedures needed to fix this problem, like detoxing their algorithms and providing clear retroactive corrections.”

Violent events like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the attack at the Christchurch mosque, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting often have their roots in anger and bigotry that festers online. It’s also undeniable that Trump and his high-profile followers have become instigators. By spreading misinformation and false claims that the election was stolen — and by giving tacit approval to groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys — Trump’s online rhetoric excited his base and encouraged the storming of the Capitol.

Pro-Trump pages on mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter amped up the event, with some latching onto Trump’s December tweet claim that January 6 would be “wild.”

Meanwhile, a host of pro-Trump websites, including trumpmarch.com, wildprotest.com, and stopthesteal.us, boosted interest in the event. There’s also evidence that specific instructions for taking the Capitol appeared on sites like Parler, 4chan, and Gab.

“These are unmoderated closed spaces where only people with fringe and extremist ideologies spend their time,” said Jonathon Morgan, the CEO of Yonder, an AI firm that tracks misinformation. “That means the information diet that they’re consuming is completely homogenous, and it kind of accelerates the process.”

These were the spaces where people who planned to attend the rally openly discussed potential violence at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6. In one Facebook group called Red-State Secession, which was eventually taken down, people posted about the weapons they planned to carry with them to the event, according to the New York Times. Telegram, Parler, Reddit, and sites like thedonald.win, a forum that’s an offshoot of a banned Donald Trump subreddit, also hosted discussion about sneaking guns into the event.

In the weeks and days leading up to January 6, a slew of hashtags implied that violence could occur at the rally. Many posted #Jan6 encouraging excitement about the date, but others implied even further disruption, including #wildprotest (presumably referencing Trump’s “wild” tweet), #fightback, and #midnightride, according to research from First Draft, a misinformation and disinformation research firm.

Yonder has logged more than 367,000 posts mentioning “civil war” on the platforms that it tracks. Morgan notes that a large majority of these posts come from Twitter, but that posts about civil war were more likely to come from users on Parler and 4chan as well as online factions, like the Proud Boys, white supremacist extremists, and communities associated with QAnon.

Meanwhile, the president continued to rile up his base. Trump said in a tweet that Washington was “being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election stolen.” And if the fuse for an explosive situation had been laid out in the weeks preceding the event, Trump lit the match when he concluded his speech at the rally by declaring that he and his supporters were going to give Republicans the “kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” Trump urged the crowd to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The mob stayed online during the violence

As the rally turned into the insurrection on Capitol Hill, swaths of online agitators remotely encouraged violence of the event. As the mob streamed video and posted about their activities on social media, commenters urged them to break into the Capitol building.

Tim Gionet, who goes by the handle Baked Alaska online, was one of the more prominent livestreamers present. The 33-year-old was not unknown before January 6: Gionet had already been labeled as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he’d previously been booted from both Twitter and YouTube. On the day of the Capitol insurrection, he turned to the platform DLive, a blockchain-based service where he has more than 16,000 followers.

One video, viewed about 7,000 times, shows Gionet wearing a brown jacket and black hat, walking around the Capitol, while the livestream’s viewers encourage him to go inside the building.

DLive

“They’re storming the Capitol,” one user wrote to Gionet. Another wrote: “TRUMP GAVE YOU AN ORDER STORM THE CAPITOL NOW.” Soon after, Gionet followed another group of Trump supporters closer to the building. That feed eventually ended, but Gionet then posted a new video from inside the building. In it, he attempted to call President Trump on a congressional phone while commenters demanded more violence. “SMASH THE WINDOW,” wrote one. “HANG ALL THE CONGRESSMAN,” wrote another. (Gionet eventually streamed himself being kicked out of the Capitol building by law enforcement.)

Also in attendance in Washington that day was Ali Alexander, a prominent promoter of “stop the steal” demands on social media, which are predicated on the conspiracy theory that the election was somehow stolen from Trump. In the days before the rally, Alexander warned his 41,000 followers on Parler, “If DC escalates ... so do we.” He told his followers that on the day of the rally, “DC becomes FORT TRUMP.” And on January 6, Alexander urged attendants to “keep each other safe & rowdy.”

After the event, another “stop the steal” Parler account with nearly 200,000 followers celebrated the taking of the Capitol as “one of the biggest gatherings in history.”

The rest of the mob shared their stories to smaller audiences with posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. As Recode’s Sara Morrison reports, an untold number of participants in the Capitol insurrection posed for photos and videos, some documenting the vandalism and violence that they helped perpetuate. Several of them were later arrested for their involvement.

While many people viewing these images were shocked to see US democracy physically in peril, people in extremist social media circles were celebrating — emboldened and empowered by visuals of the rioting, looting, and harm. Almost immediately after news spread that a person was killed, some users on social media depicted her as a martyr of their cause, rather than someone who participated in what’s been called an act of domestic terrorism.

The digital footprint left by the perpetrators of Wednesday’s violence is serving as a kind of fodder fueling further extremism. And so far, social media companies have not been fully able, or willing, to stop that. Posts celebrating the events of Wednesday will continue to proliferate and could help encourage other similar events in the future, according to Robert Evans, an investigative journalist at the research collective Bellingcat.

“The kind of experience that a lot of people, especially the more extreme people, had on the 6th is not completely dissimilar to a drug,” Evans said. “They got a very powerful high from storming the Capitol and they will be looking for the next high, the ones at least who don’t wind up in custody.”

Things could get worse

In response to the events of Wednesday, social media companies said they were amping up their response to take down calls for violence on their platforms. They also took more severe measures against President Donald Trump than they’ve ever taken before, with Facebook blocking his ability to post until the end of his presidency if not permanently. But many say it’s too late, and not enough.

“The platforms haven’t taken action over the past four years,” said Jankowicz, of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “We’ve seen a couple standout incidents. But for the most part, it’s been, ‘Yeah, it’s okay to post hate speech, we’re just going to ignore it.’ Finally, that line has been crossed.”

That said, while limiting Trump’s ability to post amounts to action, it doesn’t come close to solving the problem of online extremism. And as Morgan, the Yonder CEO, argues about social media companies’ role in all this, “There’s no action that they can take in any given crisis that’s going to undo the underlying problem that they created.” Several members of Congress have echoed similar statements.

“These isolated actions are both too late and not nearly enough,” said Sen. Mark Warner in a statement. “As I have continually said, these platforms have served as core organizing infrastructure for violent, far right groups and militia movements for several years now — helping them recruit, organize, and coordinate and in many cases (particularly in respect to YouTube) generate profits from their violent, extremist content.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, meanwhile, called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to suspend Donald Trump from Twitter for the remainder of his presidency, following Facebook’s decision to do so.

Even if mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube further restrict Trump and the violent rhetoric of some of his followers, those followers may just migrate and empower fringe platforms like Gab and Parler, who welcome them with open arms. But it’s clear that a reckoning with the platforms will continue and that their role in what led to the events of Wednesday will only be further scrutinized.

“We are going to be dealing with the implications of this for some time,” Jankowicz said. “It doesn’t matter that Trump’s account on Facebook is frozen for the next two weeks. That infrastructure and behavior is part of society now, and the line between offline and online extremism — if there ever really was one— has been blurred.”

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The official talking points for Republican lawmakers have been issued, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is on it. Let's just preface this with the context: five people have died—two of them killed—by insurrectionists attempting to overthrow the government and the results of the presidential election. That was instigated by Donald Trump and there is every indication that this wasn't a rally gone bad. It was a full-fledged and plotted coup attempt. Plotted. In the White House. Blood was shed and lives were lost in the United States Capitol. The people's house. At Trump's behest and orders.

More context. McCarthy returned to the House Chamber in the aftermath of that insurrection and occupation of the Capitol—walking past wreck and ruin of the building, broken furniture, shattered glass, bullet holes, human waste—and voted with 139 other House Republicans to throw out the votes of the citizens of Arizona and Pennsylvania. Based on QAnon lies and conspiracy theories and Trump fantasies. With that context, that waste of skin and oxygen gives the GOP narrative: "Impeaching the President with just 12 days left will only divide our country more."

As if literally nothing divides this country more than instigating and defending armed insurrection. There's three more paragraphs of that seditious drivel which you need not be subject to. Just let it be known that the highest-ranking member of the Republican Party in the House is unapologetically standing with the traitors. Oh, and as recently as 2016, he believes that Vladimir Putin pays Trump. McCarthy is a traitor. He should be expelled.

Texas congressman and House Committee on Foreign Affairs vice chair Joaquin Castro says he’s preparing legislation that would bar federal buildings and property from being named after Donald Trump, who incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol this week and to very likely try to take hostage members of Congress.

“President Trump incited an insurrection that damaged some our nation’s most significant and sacred federal property,” Castro said in a series of tweets. “Most importantly—let us learn from our past. Donald Trump should never become a future generation’s confederate symbol.”

Castro is among the over 150 House Democrats and counting who support impeaching Trump, and has also called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to begin the process of removing him from office.

“We must send a clear message not only to the American people, but to the world that the United States is a resilient democracy governed by the rule of law—of, by, and for the people,” Castro tweeted on Thursday. “I support invoking the 25th amendment and impeachment to remove President Trump from office.”

Castro has also called for the resignation of Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for his role in inciting this violent mob. “He has conducted himself shamelessly,” Castro told The Texas Tribune on Wednesday, “and I think he has done this because he believes it's the only way, the only chance that he has to win the Republican nomination for president.” 

On Wednesday, after weeks of refusing to accept the outcome of the election, President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol of the United States as members of Congress were meeting to carry out their duties to certify the election results and confirm Joe Biden’s victory.

Much will be said about the fact that these actions threaten the core of our democracy and undermine the rule of law. Commentators and political observers will rightly note that these actions are the result of disinformation and heightened political polarization in the United States. And there will be no shortage of debate and discussion about the role Trump played in giving rise to this kind of extreme behavior. As we have these discussions, however, we must take care to appreciate that this is not just about folks being angry about the outcome of one election. Nor should we believe for one second that this is a simple manifestation of the president’s lies about the integrity of his defeat. This is, like so much of American politics, about race, racism and white Americans’ stubborn commitment to white dominance, no matter the cost or the consequence.

It is not by chance that most of the individuals who descended on the nation’s capital were white, nor is it an accident that they align with the Republican Party and this president. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that symbols of white racism, including the Confederate flag, were present and prominently displayed. Rather, years of research make clear that what we witnessed in Washington, D.C., is the violent outgrowth of a belief system that argues that white Americans and leaders who assuage whiteness should have an unlimited hold on the levers of power in this country. And this, unfortunately, is what we should expect from those whose white identity is threatened by an increasingly diverse citizenry.

[Republicans Control Whether Trump Stays Or Goes]

Let’s start here: Scholars interested in the sociological underpinnings of white racism often call our attention to concerns about group status as starting places for understanding white Americans’ attitudes toward members of other social groups. In a famous essay from 1958 on the topic, entitled “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Herbert Blumer, a noted sociologist, wrote the following:

There are four basic types of feeling that seem to be always present in race prejudice in the dominant group. They are (1) a feeling of superiority, (2) a feeling that the subordinate race is intrinsically different and alien, (3) a feeling of proprietary claim to certain areas of privilege and advantage, and (4) a fear and suspicion that the subordinate race harbors designs on the prerogatives of the dominant race.

Building on Blumer’s early work, other scholars have highlighted the consequences that result when white Americans perceive threats to their dominant position in the social hierarchy. Some research by social psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, finds that reminding white Americans of changing racial demographics causes them to adopt more negative racial attitudes toward minority groups. These same researchers also find that these reminders lead politically unaffiliated white Americans to report a stronger attachment to the Republican Party and to express greater political conservatism. These findings make sense, as the GOP is widely perceived to be a party that caters to white interests, a perception that predates the election of Trump but that has undoubtedly been strengthened by his ascendance to power in the party. In her award-winning book, “White Identity Politics,” Ashley Jardina goes further than any scholar to-date in documenting the causes and consequences of white identity, arguing that the increased salience of whiteness as a social category corresponds largely with how demographics have changed in this country. Jardina finds in her research that this, in turn, has created a fear among some white Americans that their hold on power has become increasingly precarious, highlighted most sharply by the ascendance of Barack Obama, a Black man, to the White House.

And most recently, Larry Bartels, a renowned scholar of American politics at Vanderbilt University, wrote the following in his research focused on the erosion of Republicans’ commitment to democracy:

The support expressed by many Republicans for violations of a variety of crucial democratic norms is primarily attributable not to partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, or general cultural conservatism, but to what I have termed ethnic antagonism. The single survey item with the highest average correlation with antidemocratic sentiments is not a measure of attitudes toward Trump, but an item inviting respondents to agree that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Not far behind are items positing that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country,” that immigrants get more than their fair share of government resources, that people on welfare often have it better than those who work for a living, that speaking English is “essential for being a true American,” and that African-Americans “need to stop using racism as an excuse.”

To summarize Bartels’s claims, white Republicans who have come to oppose democracy do so, in part, because they don’t like those whom they believe democracy serves. And, more than that, they believe that the interests of nonwhite Americans have been given priority over the interests of their racial group. Many white Americans seem to be asking themselves, Why act in defense of a democracy that benefits “those people”?

[The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration]

So, let’s return to the images of Wednesday, when a crowd of white people gathered at the Capitol with American flags and Trump flags and symbols of the Confederacy. For these white Americans, the notion of America itself is likely one that is white, making the American flag they so proudly wield as a symbol also one of white supremacy and white racial domination. Of course, the iconography of the failed Confederacy, alongside other reminders of white racial violence, including the placing of a noose around a tree near the Capitol, are intentional, too. For those who broke glass in windows of the Capitol, who marched in opposition to American democracy, who held up as a model the seditious behaviors of slaveholding states, who threatened the lives of elected officials and caused chaos that lays bare the dangerous situation we are in as a country — these are not political protesters asking their government for a redress of grievances. Nor are they patriots whose actions should be countenanced in a society governed by the rule of law.

Instead, we must characterize them as they are: They are a dangerous mob of grievous white people worried that their position in the status hierarchy is threatened by a multiracial coalition of Americans who brought Biden to power and defeated Trump, whom back in 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates called the first white president. Making this provocative point, Coates wrote, “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” So, when we think about those who gathered in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and who will surely continue their advance in opposition to democratic rule, let it not be lost on us that they do not simply come in defense of Donald Trump. They come in defense of white supremacy.

On Wednesday, supporters of Donald Trump pushed through police lines, stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashed windows, broke open doors, and went prowling through the halls with flexi-cuffs seeking congressional hostages. In the following hours and days, Republicans have expressed shock at this totally unexpected event, and Trump-appointed Pentagon officials have stated that the violence was “beyond their wildest dreams.” But Republicans have had over four years to understand exactly who Donald Trump is, what he is capable of doing, and who his followers are. Law enforcement officials at every level had not only a very good idea of the scale of this event, but the amount of violence it would bring.

The nation may be shocked by the visuals of what happened on Wednesday. People wearing horned helmets, T-shirts with Nazi slogans, and waving Confederate banners through the halls of Congress, made some draw parallels to the sacking of Rome by barbarian hordes. However, two days after this spontaneous event, the thing that’s become most clear is that it wasn’t spontaneous at all. It’s not just the culmination of everything Republicans have been doing for decades, it’s also an event that was launched, intentionally, as an insurrection against the United States.

Trump has been laying the groundwork for this moment from the beginning

Trump’s encouragement of violence from his followers goes back to before he began occupying the White House. That includes encouraging people to beat up protesters at his rallies, calling for and then deploying active military forces to face immigrants seeking asylum, praising Nazi marchers at Charlottesville who were complicit in the murder of a peaceful protester, and repeatedly making threats of violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and others. Trump has made it absolutely clear to his followers that violence—including deadly force—is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged.

Even if Trump had lost in 2016, he had already prepared his supporters to use violence as a means of overturning the results of the election. The same claims of election fraud and polling fraud had already been laid then, because Trump expected to lose. And the same calls for his supporters to carry out violent response and “monitor” the polls with armed poll-watchers had prompted the nation for widespread violence that was only halted by Trump’s surprising win.

Trump positioned officials to clear the way for violence in Washington, D.C.

Immediately after the election, Donald Trump began replacing Pentagon officials—and not just any officials. Trump explicitly replaced those officials who were directly responsible for the deployment and disposition of forces that protect the capital. Included in his targeting were those who had objected to the use of active military to attack peaceful protests over the summer.

Over the summer, Trump brought in unidentified forces including riot squads from the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals—none of them trained in dealing with civilian protests—to push back against peaceful marchers from Black Lives Matter following the police murder of George Floyd. In addition, Trump officials lead the Park Police, Secret Service, and others in what was frequently referred to as massive overresponse to small numbers of nonviolent protesters. All the while, Trump equated violence with “law and order” and used claims about shadowy antifa forces to justify going into cities over the objections of mayors and governors.

Through his time in the White House, Trump has tested the boundaries of using military forces—active military, National Guard, and irregular forces—to control civilian populations. It’s clear that he understands exactly where the controls for that power are located and exactly how requests for assistance can be met, or thwarted. 

Trump’s November moves at the Pentagon now look like express preparation for exactly the moment that came on Wednesday.

Trump planned Wednesday’s event expressly to intimidate Congress

The placement of the event on Jan. 6 was, without any doubt, meant to intimidate representatives and senators during the count of the Electoral College vote. Trump meant this event to encourage objections to that vote—he said as much during the rally just before the assault. It’s clear from phone calls made by Rudy Giuliani that Trump wanted his supporters in Congress to object over and over, generating the maximum possible delay. And it’s clear from Trump’s own statements that he hoped to force Mike Pence into taking action beyond the law, forcing the ceremonial count to end without declaring Joe Biden the winner and pushing the next steps back into the courts.

The howling mob Trump unleashed was terrorism in its purest sense. They were meant to cause terror. To Congress. To interfere with the transition of power.

The event in Washington was designed to be violent, and it was funded by dark money

Trump was pleased with the numbers of attendees at his rally on Wednesday, and he certainly wasn’t turning away his normal crowd of racists, xenophobes, nationalists, and christianists. But this event was expressly built to attract those who Trump had already told to “Stand by,” including the Proud Boys and other Nazi groups who were invited to Washington, D.C. for a “wild” event.

This same crowd also constructed a gallows on the law outside, complete with steps and a ready noose.

This was not a spontaneous event, it was a failed coup 

Planned for months, supported by new officials at the Pentagon, supported by big-money Republican donors, and cheered on by Trump supporters in Congress … this was not a spontaneous or unexpected event. It was a purposely staged event meant to disrupt the final stage of a U.S. election, throw the nation into chaos, and perhaps end with the televised murder of members of Congress.

As it was unfolding, Trump’s family was treating this exactly like what it was: something they welcomed and celebrated. The image of a gallows raised in front of the Capitol is on screen as Kimberly Guilfoyle dances.

They weren’t watching this event with disgust and shock. They were loving it. They were waiting for that moment when Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer might be hauled out to the roars of the crowd. They were waiting for blood. They were cheering for America to fall.

The only thing that wasn’t planned at this event … was failing. Trump didn’t anticipate that Congress would return to the building and complete the vote count. He didn’t think that Mike Pence would carry on naming Joe Biden as the victor. He didn’t anticipate that much of the American public would recoil in horror. Most of all, he didn’t expect that most of Congress would respond with anger rather than fear.

Donald Trump doesn’t just need to be removed. He, his family, and everyone involved in the planning of this event need to understand what it means to be on the losing end of a coup attempt.

But the first step is getting him out. Now.

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The calls for Donald Trump's immediate removal from office are growing louder and more insistent with every hour that passes. As of Friday morning, 159 House Democrats and 22 Senate Democrats have issued statements supporting impeachment. A Republican, Sen. Ben Sasse, is also on board, saying that he will "definitely consider whatever articles [the House] might move because I believe the president has disregarded his oath of office. … What he did was wicked."

Assistance House Speaker Katherine Clark told CNN that the House will move forward with an impeachment vote by the middle of next week if Vice President Pence and the Cabinet have not acted to remove Trump using the 25th Amendment. They need to move faster. They need to move now, because the 25th Amendment route is not happening and Trump remains dangerous.

Pence spent the whole of Thursday avoiding phone calls from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. The resignations of two Cabinet secretaries—Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos—complicate that process as well. CNBC reports that Steven Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo have had discussions with staff in their own agencies, identifying obstacles—the time it would take with just two weeks to inauguration, whether the "acting" secretaries—three of them—would be able to vote, and "concerns that forcing Trump from office could further stoke tensions among his base and make him a hero of the far right, doing more bad in the long term than good in the short term." Meaning they don't want to become targets of Trump's violent mob. "The general plan now is to let the clock run out," a former senior administration official told CNBC. "There will be a reckoning for this president, but it doesn't need to happen in the next 13 days."

A Trump tweet—he's out of Twitter jail for the moment—belies that sentiment. He remains defiant, threatening that the "great American Patriots" who voted for him and presumably those who attempted to overthrow the government at his instigation "will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!" He remains a danger and he and his mob pose a very real threat to the inauguration on Jan. 20, not to mention the entire Congress, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris for the foreseeable future.

House Democrats are meeting Friday at noon and leadership seems ready to move forward. "I can confirm that we have had discussions about it and I would hope that the speaker would move forward if the vice president refuses to do what he is required to do under the Constitution," Rep. James Clyburn told CNN. "Everyone knows that this president is deranged." The previous impeachment manager, Rep. Adam Schiff, is ready to go. "Donald Trump lit the fuse which exploded at the Capitol," he tweeted. "Every day that he remains in office, he is a danger to the Republic. He should leave office immediately, through resignation, the 25th Amendment or impeachment."

At this point it seems to be a matter of when, not if, on impeachment. That puts pressure on the Senate Majority Leader (for the next few weeks) Mitch McConnell to act. The Senate is recessed until Jan. 19, but can and should reconvene for an impeachment hearing. If McConnell has any hopes at all of reconstituting a majority in 2022, he'll feel that pressure.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan is leading a group of House Democrats in demanding that congressional leaders immediately reconvene both chambers to begin the process of impeaching and removing President Donald Trump, arguing that the nation cannot afford to “risk his unhinged behavior any longer.”

“The attack on our nation’s Capitol yesterday was a result of his incitement, and we cannot go home while he remains in the highest office in our land, threatening our elected officials, our nation’s Capitol, and our very democracy,” reads the Thursday letter (pdf), which is addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The call by Tlaib and other House progressives came shortly before Trump released a brief video address late Thursday acknowledging that there will be a new administration on January 20 and pledging to submit to an “orderly transition,” remarks that came just two days after a violent right-wing mob encouraged by the president invaded and ravaged the U.S. Capitol Building.

Tlaib and her Democratic colleagues warned that while Trump’s official departure is less than two weeks away, that short period “may prove to be detrimental to our nation—every day that he remains in office is a serious threat to our democracy and our national security.”

“We will set a dangerous precedent if there are no consequences for a sitting U.S. president inciting violence as a last-ditch effort to remain in power against the will of the American people who voted him out of office,” the lawmakers wrote. “Congress must reconvene immediately in order to begin proceedings to remove Donald J. Trump from office.”

Despite urgent pressure on the House hold the president to account for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Democratic leaders adjourned the chamber Thursday morning after Congress certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

During a press conference Thursday afternoon, Pelosi called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and said the House “may be prepared to move forward with impeachment” if he refuses to act, remarks that did not reflect the sense of urgency expressed by many members of her caucus.

“Please call the House to order and let’s get it done. Today. Right now,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has unveiled articles of impeachment against the president charging that he violated his oath and abused his power by attempting to overturn the November election and inciting violence in an “attempted coup against our country.”

Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement late Thursday that they “have not yet heard back from the vice president” but hope to receive a response “as soon as possible.” The statement does not mention impeachment.

Earlier Thursday, Schumer told reporters that when he and Pelosi attempted to get Pence on the phone hours after the assault on the Capitol, White House staff “kept us on hold for 25 minutes, and then said the vice president wouldn’t come on the phone.”

With Pence predictably refusing to act and as members of the Cabinet—most recently Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—avoid the 25th Amendment push by jumping ship, The American Prospect‘s David Dayen argued Thursday that “the only remedy that can actually do the job here is impeachment and removal.”

“The need to remove, needless to say, is urgent,” Dayen wrote. “Every crime perpetrated in Washington yesterday is a federal crime. Many U.S. attorneys, all appointed by Trump, are lining up to say they will prosecute seditionists, but Trump can end that immediately through the pardon power. Everyone in the Capitol yesterday can be absolved, if they were ever at risk at all.”

“Moreover,” Dayen continued, “each day of the final 13 that Trump remains in power gives him the ability to run this cycle again, or worse. And impeachment would bar him from any federal office in the future, which is an appropriate outcome for someone explicitly vowing to overthrow the government.”

The New York Times reported Thursday that, in addition to granting clemency to a number of other officials, Trump “has suggested to aides he wants to pardon himself in the final days of his presidency,” an idea the president raised prior to his incitement of the right-wing mob. It is not clear whether Trump has suggested a self-pardon in the wake of the Capitol attack, according to the Times.

Observers were quick to note that either the successful invocation of the 25th Amendment or impeachment and removal by Congress would strip Trump of his pardon power, which he has thus far wielded to the benefit of his political allies and convicted war criminals. The Constitution makes clear that presidents “cannot pardon offenses for which they are impeached,” as one expert recently pointed out.

Barring Trump from pardoning himself is reason alone “to remove Trump from office immediately, whether it be via the 25th Amendment or impeachment,” argued Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections.

“The rule of law is dead if a sitting president can incite an insurrectionist mob to overturn democracy and then pardon everyone involved, including himself,” Wolf added.

Will Stancil, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, tweeted late Thursday that “impeachment can’t be ‘early next week,'” a response to one Democratic lawmaker who suggested such a timeline.

“There are reports that Trump is gearing up for mass preemptive pardons,” Stancil wrote. “There are reports he’s trying to start a war. He’s certainly willing to foment unrest. And surely we all realize, by now, that he means it. Impeach him tomorrow.”

The post ‘Cannot Afford to Wait’: Rashida Tlaib Leads Letter Demanding Congress Immediately Reconvene to Impeach and Remove Trump appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Shortly after the election in November, Donald Trump began replacing officials at the Pentagon. Experienced leaders and those with at least some degree of competence, were dismissed as Trump packed the halls with sycophants who had demonstrated complete loyalty to Trump. And in particular, Trump made sure to get rid of those officials who had resisted efforts to use active military troops against Black Lives Matter protestors over the summer.

At the time, most people were concerned that Trump was preparing for some last-minute military strike overseas, or that he wanted to be ready to level bayonets at any additional BLM protests. But it’s now clear there was a plan. Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol was the plan. Because Trump’s new crew at the Pentagon blocked requests from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for the use of the National Guard to contain Trump’s “wild” protest.  And they kept on blocking it even as senators and representatives were frantically phoning from inside the siege.

This was not a spontaneous event. It was, in every way, a coup plot. And the Pentagon was part of it.

Looking at the obviously anemic preparations for the mob which swarmed the Capitol on Wednesday, it may have seemed like bad planning. However, it’s becoming more and more obvious that it was absolutely intentional. 

As The Washington Post reports, Bowser made multiple requests for National Guard forces to help contain a crowd that was expected to contain a large number of white supremacists and militia. But a pair of memos issued in response to that request, the Pentagon blocked the distribution of weapons or riot gear to the D. C. guard, prohibited them from interacting with protestors, and even blocked the guard’s ability to share equipment with local law enforcement.

As the assault on the Capitol unfolded Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned on Thursday, made “an urgent plea” for a 200-member rapid response force to help police at the Capitol building. However, an official from the office of the secretary of the Army replied that “wasn’t going to be possible.” As a reason, that official said the Pentagon didn’t like the “optics” of Guard members entering the Capitol—even though the building was at that point surrounded by thousands of Trump supporters were had forced their way through multiple levels of police security. It wasn’t until Trump supporters had actually stormed the building, smashed their way into the chambers of Congress, ransacked congressional offices, and prowled the halls hoping to take political leaders hostage, that the Pentagon finally approved the use of National Guard forces.

All of this shines a new light on Trump’s post-election moves at the Pentagon. That included bringing in disgraced former Gen. Anthony Tata, Islamophobic right-wing radio host Frank Wuco, and conspiracy theorist Rich Higgins. A day after positioning this trio, Trump replaced the chief of staff at the Pentagon with former Devin Nunes staffer Kash Patel. On the same day, he forced out the undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics.

On the morning of January 6, first-term Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican chiefly notable for her support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, tweeted that the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to a new American Revolution.

“Today is 1776,” she wrote.

It turned out that describing Wednesday as a violent revolution was more apt than Boebert may have intended. Several hours later, on the heels of a speech by the president decrying the 2020 election as stolen, a pro-Trump mob descended on the US Capitol, overwhelming Capitol Police and storming the building. Trump supporters waved Confederate flags and seized control of the Senate chambers; police drew their guns. At least four people died as a result of the chaos.

Blaming President Trump for this violence is, at this point, stating the obvious. He has been inciting his supporters for weeks, telling them that the election has been stolen and they need to stand up to save freedom. If you really believe that — took what the president said seriously — why wouldn’t you take dramatic action?

Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

But the blame needs to go beyond Trump and land squarely on the Republican Party itself — an institution that, for decades, employed a political strategy that sowed the seeds of an uprising against the American state.

The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. It is a belief that explains much of what we’ve seen from the GOP in the past few decades, the glue that binds together Republicans ranging from shitposters in the QAnon fever swamps to much of the GOP congressional caucus.

Whether elite Republicans genuinely believe what they tell their base is beside the point. The fact is their delegitimizing rhetoric has been the fuel of the conservative movement for many, many years now. Trump’s presidency, and the violence with which it is ending, represents the logical next step for the modern GOP — and where it goes from here will determine our future as a democracy.

The ideological structure of the GOP encourages rebellion against Democratic rule

In 2010, during the height of Tea Party fervor, then-Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) told talk radio host Lars Larson that she believed Americans might need to take up arms against the tyranny of Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?

Angle’s story is illuminating. Initially, she ran as an insurgent, casting herself as the rock-ribbed alternative to a weak, corrupt Republican establishment. The party actually tried to stop her, but she was embraced by the GOP once she won the Republican primary in Nevada. The party held a glitzy fundraiser in Washington for Angle several months after the “Second Amendment remedies” comment.

Hardly a relic of the Tea Party era, it’s a story that’s emblematic of the contemporary GOP. The party leadership has created an institution where people like Angle can win primaries; though leaders may resist extremists at times, they end up admitting them as members in good standing when it becomes clear that the choice in a given election is either a right-wing radical or a Democrat. As a result, there’s a one-way ratchet toward an increasingly extreme party, one that has convinced itself over time that Democratic rule is so dangerous that getting in bed with anti-democratic radicals is preferable.

There are at least three critical features of the GOP as an institution that have allowed this process to go on as it has.

First, there is the argument, offered by mainstream Republicans at the highest levels, that freedom itself is on the ballot: that the Democratic agenda is so catastrophic that it might spell the end of America as we know it.

This is something Republicans have been saying about Democratic policies — including ones common in other advanced democracies — for decades. In 1961, Ronald Reagan warned that the passage of Medicare would be the end of liberty in America: that if federalized insurance for the elderly were to become law, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Sarah Palin offered a more recent variant in 2009, writing in a Facebook post that Obamacare would create “death panels,” transforming the “America I know and love” by imposing “a system [that] is downright evil” on it.

In 2014, Ted Cruz claimed that Obama’s use of executive orders was creating “an imperial presidency [that] threatens the liberty of every citizen.” In 2019, the National Republican Congressional Committee — the official arm of the party responsible for House races — all but accused Democrats of being murderous Stalinists:

Hyperbole in politics is normal, of course. There are plenty of examples of rank-and-file Democratic partisans calling George W. Bush “Hitler.”

The difference is that casting the opposing party as an existential threat, a demonic force bent on destroying the very fabric of a free society, has become an accepted part of conservative rhetoric at the highest levels of the party. Yes, you’ll see an example here and there, but there is simply no comparison with how Democrats talk about Republicans; polarization in the United States is profoundly asymmetric.

These arguments do not merely attack Democratic policies; they attack the very idea that Democrats can be legitimate leaders of the American government. Among some Republicans, they bleed into baroque conspiracy theories about Democrats as individuals, explanations for how people like Obama and Hillary Clinton can support such heinous policies. Obama isn’t merely a liberal Democrat; he must be a Kenyan Muslim anti-colonial plant pushing America toward full communism.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their book How Democracies Die, talk of “mutual toleration”: the idea that, in a democracy, both parties respect the other one’s right to win elections and hold power. In the United States, Republicans have all but told their supporters that Democrats do not, in fact, have a right to rule — that they are fundamentally hostile to the American way of life.

This rhetoric might not be so bad if it weren’t for the second prong of the problem: the alternative conservative media ecosystem that disseminates those messages.

From practically the inception of the modern conservative movement in the 1950s, a central tenet has been that the mainstream media is irredeemably biased against them — an agent of liberalism, not to be trusted. The conservative response has been to relentlessly delegitimize the media in their public discourse and to construct alternative media institutions for its base to consume.

This created space for extreme voices who, out of sincere belief or rank opportunism, chose to peddle dangerous falsehoods. Just think about everything that’s been said on Fox and talk radio in the past decade: Glenn Beck arguing that AmeriCorps would become Obama’s SS, Rush Limbaugh claiming that Obama and Hillary Clinton were responsible for Benghazi, and — of course — the spread of Donald Trump’s claim that Obama wasn’t born in America, something 56 percent of Republicans still believe.

There are no guardrails in the conservative media ecosystem world, no institutional Republicans willing to force their allies to adhere to the truth. These are the conditions under which Trump’s totally false claims about election fraud could become an article of faith among hardcore right-wingers — to the point where storming the Capitol started to seem justifiable, even righteous.

But it’s not just that Republicans have primed their audience to hate Democrats and created a media system that promotes the most extreme claims about them: It’s that they’ve tolerated and even cultivated figures in their ranks who are willing to explicitly endorse violent, individual action.

In 2009, for example, Alaska Rep. Don Young signed a letter claiming that “should our government seek to further tax, restrict or register firearms ... the duty of us good and faithful people will not be to obey them but to alter or abolish them and institute new government.” The letter’s author, Alaska-based militia member Schaeffer Cox, was later convicted of plotting to kidnap and kill federal agents. Young is still in Congress; in fact, he is currently the longest-serving House member in the GOP’s history.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

If you are a rank-and-file Republican, the kind of person who listens to your party’s elected officials and friendly media outlets, you have been marinating in anti-democratic beliefs for years: that Democrats are fundamentally hostile to the American way of life, that people telling you otherwise cannot be trusted, that you have an obligation to fight against tyranny on your own.

In a 2020 survey, 51 percent of Republicans agreed with the claim that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Forty-one percent said that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”

“These are not fringe views. They are the views of roughly half of Republicans. Those views were plainly in sight months before a mob stormed the Capitol,” writes John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. “Without concerted and sustained pushback by Republican leaders, those views will remain long after Trump is gone.”

The reaction to Wednesday’s fracas vindicates Sides’s pessimism. A snap YouGov poll of Republicans across the country found that a plurality — 45 percent — approved of the storming of the Capitol.

The party is the problem

The day after President Trump incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he called in to a Republican National Committee winter meeting. The assembled Republicans did not greet the president with horror or anger; instead, he was met with cheers.

Of course, not every Republican is as corrupted as the ones on that call. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted for Trump’s impeachment and has gone after him in the day since the attack on Capitol Hill. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has called for a second impeachment after the mob.

But even the “responsible” leaders have often been complicit. Lest we forget, Romney courted Trump’s endorsement during his 2012 presidential run — while Trump was in the midst of his birther crusade against Obama. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), famous for his thumbs-down vote on Trump’s Obamacare repeal proposal, is the man who unleashed Palin on the world by making her his vice presidential pick in 2008.

From top to bottom, the party has stoked the embers of extremism. They have worked to convince their supporters that Democrats are monsters, they have to delegitimize the mainstream press and replace it with fact-free alternatives, and they have embraced extremist politicians and commentators who have condoned violence in the name of putting down the Democratic “threat.”

This is not just a question of “that’s how we got Trump” (though this is in fact how we got Trump). It’s that the party leadership has knowingly and willfully created an entire segment of the electorate that is prone to violent and dangerous conspiratorial thinking.

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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In the days since the Capitol insurrection, there have been innumerable calls from legislators and commentators to impeach Donald Trump or for his Cabinet to remove him using the powers of the 25th Amendment. It’s possible that such a thing will happen; some reports have suggested the discussions are more serious than they have been in the past.

But we have reason to be skeptical. Removing Trump from office would amount to an admission of Republican complicity.

They knew who they were enabling. In 2016, Ted Cruz called Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described him as a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot.” And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), in comments that proved prescient, describes him as someone who was inciting violence among his supporters:

I think we also have to look at the rhetoric coming from the frontrunner in the presidential campaign. This is a man who in rallies has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he’ll pay their legal fees, someone who has encouraged people in the audience to rough up anyone who stands up and says something he doesn’t like. …

But leaders cannot say whatever they want, because words have consequences. They lead to actions that others take. And when the person you’re supporting for president is going around and saying things like, ‘Go ahead and slap them around, I’ll pay your legal fees,’ what do you think’s going to happen next?

The dangers of Trump were obvious to these men. But they chose to enable him after his victory anyway, much in the way their party chose to embrace Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle and Glenn Beck and all the other extremists who have proven useful to it. The Republican establishment created the conditions for Wednesday’s violence and chaos, and these conditions will persist even if Trump is removed prematurely. QAnon supporters are now sitting in Congress; Newsmax, a more unhinged version of Fox, has only grown in recent months; Trump was greeted by applause by House Republicans Thursday morning.

Just hours after her 1776 tweet, Rep. Boebert tweeted fearfully about the attack on Congress. “We were locked in the House chambers,” she said, as if the chickens weren’t coming home to roost.

But the fact that they don’t really want a violent uprising doesn’t mean their most committed supporters feel the same way. Republicans — not just Donald Trump, but the entire political movement — own that mob. If they do not change course, they will own the next one, too.

The successful storming of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters on Wednesday represents perhaps the greatest policing failure in American history, a catastrophic collapse that ended up costing one Capitol Police officer his life and the entire security leadership of the Capitol their jobs.

With both houses of Congress in a crucial joint session, the crowds that first approached the Capitol’s outer fence were no larger than the department deals with routinely. Yet within minutes, the outer fence lines had collapsed and officers were in full-blown retreat. The mob surged into the building and soon had almost free run of the place, rifling through the Parliamentarian’s office, taking mail from the hastily abandoned office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and carrying away or destroying all manner of objects. Rioters with Confederate flags strode past oil paintings of Civil War leaders. For the better part of the 3 p.m. hour Wednesday, overwhelmed officers seemed to evaporate, ceding the building to the invaders.

Through the afternoon Wednesday and through Thursday, current and former major city police chiefs traded puzzled and worried calls, all amazed at the assault on—and stunningly easy fall of—one of the world’s supposedly most secure buildings.

It wasn’t just the building that had them horrified. In the past two decades, the Capitol Police has grown into one of the largest, best-funded and most single-focus police departments in the country, with a budget of more than $460 million and around 2,000 sworn officers to guard just 2 square miles of the capital. (By comparison, that’s half the size of the entire police force for Washington, D.C.)

Appalled experts, watching the crisis unfold, asked themselves: Where was the protective intelligence? Where was the quick reaction force? Where were the long guns? Where were the helmets and batons? Where were the tall, secure fences that normally ring the Capitol during high-profile protests? And perhaps most important: Where was the strategy? Word on Thursday evening that the Capitol Police evidently twice turned down offers of reinforcements only deepened the sense of disbelief.

“It was so disheartening,” says R. Gil Kerlikowske, the former chief of police in Seattle and Buffalo and former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “I’m still pretty shocked.”

“They were woefully underprepared, and there will be a lot of deserved finger-pointing,” says a former New York Police Department executive, who spoke anonymously to criticize another department.

“USCP should know better, and has been dealing with crowds for decades,” said a former Capitol Hill security official.

Minute by minute, individual officers sometimes acted bravely, but hour by hour, Wednesday’s events demonstrated a top-to-bottom failure by a key federal law-enforcement agency. The crisis can’t even be called a failure of imagination, as 9/11 is sometimes seen, because in many ways the idea that the pro-Trump mob might march on the Capitol to disrupt the proceedings inside seemed all but obvious. Nor was this an incident that just slipped under the radar. The joint session inside was the single biggest news event in the United States that day, and the rioters had been planning disruptive protest for weeks, in the open.

What went wrong? The day was a textbook example of cascading mistakes of intelligence, preparation, training and, most of all, police leadership. Though a full accounting still awaits, the basic failure at the center of the Capitol disaster also underscores, for many experts, the irrelevance of big security budgets and number of officers if an organization’s leadership fails when it counts.

Already on Thursday, heads were beginning to roll; the Capitol Police report ultimately to the heads of the House and Senate, through their respective sergeants-at-arms, and both the House and Senate sergeant-at-arms resigned Thursday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also called for the resignation of the Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, a veteran of the D.C. police appointed to the Capitol force last year.

Sund, for his part, initially issued a statement defending his department, but appeared to know the trouble he was in: Pelosi said he never reached out to her, even more than 24 hours after yesterday’s sacking of the Capitol and her office. By dinnertime Thursday, he’d turned in a letter of resignation, too.

The Capitol Police, which until the 1990s had perennially struggled for resources—more a team of security guards than an elite force—has undergone a sea change since four Capitol-altering events: The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a 1998 attempt by a gunman to storm the House whip’s office, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent spate of anthrax-laced letters targeting Capitol Hill leaders. Until those events, most members of Congress saw little value in its police force beyond, as one police leader told me, “Where’s my parking space, and can I get a better one?”

The Capitol Police, as much as any federal law enforcement agency, has been the huge beneficiary of the boom in government security spending, nearly tripling in size in the past quarter century—in no small part because it’s the agency in charge of protecting those who appropriate the money in the first place. It has also consolidated its control of Capitol Hill, merging in 2009 with the previously separate Library of Congress police.

Today, the Capitol Police boasts advanced resources equal to the largest and best police departments in the country, including a bomb squad, intelligence unit, hazmat units and specialized dignitary protection agents, as well as crowd control and riot gear and access to an arsenal of weapons that would impress many small armies. Its officers are well-wired with other local and regional police departments and participate in FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Plus it has the entire federal government and numerous local and regional D.C. police departments to call upon for help when needed.

And, at its core, its whole job is to protect about 270 acres, a land mass less than a third the size of New York’s Central Park—including, and especially, the 58-acre Capitol and grounds itself. That unusual balance—immense resources and an extremely specific zone to protect—makes its colossal failure Wednesday so much more stunning to law enforcement experts.

It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of warning about possible unrest Wednesday; beyond the Capitol grounds, the city of Washington, D.C., had activated massive protest protocols, blocking city streets with dump trucks, municipal buses and snow plows. The National Guard had been activated; D.C.’s Metropolitan Police were organized enough to arrest one of the leaders of the Proud Boys as he arrived in the city for the upcoming protests.

The Capitol Police should, in theory, have had the crowd-control skills to meet the moment. It’s an agency uniquely experienced in handling First Amendment protests and protesters—on issues as varied as abortion rights, health care or anti-war activists. After run-of-the-mill traffic offenses, protest-related arrests account for the majority of the department’s total arrests; it probably arrests and confronts more protesters than any other police department in the country. Nor are the Capitol Police a stranger to securing high-profile events, from presidential State of the Union addresses to the inauguration set for later this month on the very scaffolding and stands that the Trump mob rampaged over Wednesday.

Yet despite all of that, there appeared to be zero contingency plans, no meaningful reinforcements at hand as the pro-Trump mob approached, and none of the multiperimeter, defense-in-depth strategies one would expect to see in response to such a widely foreseen and publicized protest. There was no quick reaction force poised out of sight in buses around the corner, as one would normally expect to see at a potentially explosive protest situation. “Where were the guys in hats and bats?” asked one law enforcement leader, using the colloquial term for riot gear. (During anti-war protests during the Nixon era, 300 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division were kept on reserve in the White House cafeteria in case protesters broke through the outer rings of security.)

The failure to plan meant that the die was cast as soon as the Trump mob began walking to the Capitol. In the military, the saying goes “prior planning prevents piss-poor performance,” and the Capitol Police lost the battle for Congress on Wednesday hundreds of yards away from its famous steps—as soon as the mob pushed over and past the first low metal fence far down on the west grounds of the approach to the building.

But from there, the department continued to fail, collapsing in a way familiar to any 19th-century general watching an army in retreat. At every turn, officers seemed at a loss to respond, indicating both training lapses and catastrophic leadership failures. There were failures at the start: A video, with unclear context, circulated on social media of Capitol Police even opening and removing barricades to allow the rioters close to the Capitol. There were failures as it unfolded: Other videos showed officers posing for selfies with rioters inside occupied Capitol office buildings. And there were failures as the crisis wound down: An officer even held a woman’s hand as she was escorted out of the building and down the steps. By late afternoon, police had made fewer arrests (13) in the storming of the U.S. Capitol than are typically made at the New York Giants stadium during a home game (21).

It took more than five hours for control to be reestablished, and only after thousands more law enforcement and military resources were rushed to the Capitol from across the city and neighboring states—resources desperately requested from the Pentagon and the FBI, among others, that Capitol Police leaders had turned down in the days and hours ahead of the mob’s arrival.

Dozens of Capitol Police were injured in the attack—some seriously, and one was on life support Thursday, according to union officials—but the storming and sacking of Capitol offices does not appear to have resulted in serious injury or the deaths of any Hill staff or members of Congress, but the apparent bullet holes visible Thursday in windows and walls make clear how narrowly further tragedy was averted. One protester was apparently shot and killed by Capitol Police; three others apparently died in medical incidents. Similarly, photos of members of the mob carrying zip ties raise the haunting possibility that a hostage nightmare could have unfolded inside the Capitol itself.

“There will be a lot of questions that need answering,” former Capitol Police chief Terrance Gainer told news radio station WTOP on Wednesday. “When we lost the steps, and then lost the upper deck on the east and west side, that was whopping trouble—that’s not supposed to happen.”

The scenes at the Capitol were all the more mystifying for those who have followed and watched the post-9/11 rise of the security state in Washington, D.C., a seemingly constant expanse of money at the expense of the capital’s traditional openness. Anyone who has lived and worked on Capitol Hill both before and after 9/11 has seen the nation’s capital tranformed from a relatively open seat of government into a security jungle of bollards, barriers, metal detectors, blast-proof windows, biological threat monitors and other security measures. Nowhere has that transformation been greater than around the White House and the U.S. Capitol. But Wednesday’s spectacle showed that money and equipment are no cure-all for shortcomings in organization and thinking.

Once the joint session of Congress was able to reconvene late Wednesday evening, Schumer called the day one of “infamy,” echoing the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It more accurately might be called a day of ignominy, one that will surely require a complete reshaping and rethinking of the force intended to protect the People’s House.

As the U.S. Capitol was ransacked Wednesday, Trump administration officials watched in horror, fearful not only of the rioting their boss had inspired but of the residual damage that would fall on their careers.

The victims of the chaos, Trump staffers insisted, included Trump staffers themselves.

“The people who this is hardest on, aside from obviously the people in the Capitol and the police and the people who were hurt, are the people who have staked their reputations and their political, financial and career fortunes on defending the president and he’s just made it harder on us,” said one lower-level Trump administration official.

Reputational concern was just one of a variety of emotions that percolated among White House aides in the aftermath of the rioting. Throughout the administration, officials weighed whether to resign after watching the president encourage protestors to march to the Capitol.

Some Trump aides scoffed at those who chose to leave, arguing that to work for Trump is to know and endure scandal.

“I personally think Charlottesville was worse than what happened yesterday and if you didn’t resign after that, it’s kind of a chickenshit move to do it 14 days before the transfer of power,” said a senior Trump administration official. “It shows a lot of selfishness. ‘Let’s make it about me. I’m resigning because I don’t like what happened.’”

Others in the administration had work benefits on their mind. Some wondered whether it was worth it to burn more paid vacation time they could earn. Some were reluctant to depart before their formal off-boarding date because doing so could leave them ineligible for unemployment benefits as they begin a job search.

And what future employment opportunities would there even be, others wondered.

“This,” one administration official said of Wednesday’s events, “will hurt us in trying to get jobs.”

The lower-level Trump administration official was not impressed by his colleagues who were fleeing the scene, saying that they were engaged in “pearl-clutching trying to save face for future employment.” A more entrepreneurial man—like, say, him—could turn the Capitol siege into an advantage when it came time for future job interviews.

“If anything, I hope to pitch [Wednesday] one day as ‘look if you want to talk about an employee who can continue to produce and continue to have a good attitude in the toughest, highest stakes and highest pressure situations, [that’s me],’” the official said. He stressed that he doesn’t condone violence.

Asked if he planned to resign because of the riots, the official said he’s already submitted his resignation letter, but it’s effective Jan. 20, when all political appointees have to leave anyways.

“A lot of us want to [also] build up a lot of vacation time as possible so we can get paid out what we’ve been planning to get paid out because a lot of us are going to be unemployed for some period of time because it has been an extraordinarily difficult time to get hired,” the official said.

With just a few weeks left in the Trump administration, and with other people working from home because of the pandemic, the current staffing situation in the White House could best be described as “in flux.” Two former White House officials said the West Wing was “barebones” and “extremely empty.”

“Yesterday was just completely counterproductive and harms the movement,” one of the former White House officials said.

A third former senior White House official said that the statement Trump put out early Thursday morning on deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino’s Twitter account, in which he said he would accept a peaceful transfer of power, was partly an effort to stop mass resignations.

It wasn’t successful. At least twelve more Trump officials announced their resignation during the day on Thursday, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; special envoy to Northern Ireland Mick Mulvaney; Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors; Mark Vandroff, a senior National Security Council official and senior Commerce Department appointee John Costello.

By Thursday night, Trump had released a video, this time conceding his loss and urging for calm and reconciliation.

Some of those who left the administration excoriated Trump for egging on his supporters while glossing over the role they may have played in enabling the president.

“Clearly [Trump] is not the same as he was eight months ago,” former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told CNBC after resigning from his special envoy position.

But the departures had a secondary effect: leaving the president surrounded by an ever smaller group of true loyalists. This group includes aides like Scavino and personnel director John McEntee, who have tightly tied their sails to Trump. It also includes those who have indulged Trump for the last two months on conspiracy theories about election fraud and who never seem keen on giving the president bad news. “[Mark] Meadows has been so scared that he’s just been telling him everything he wants to hear,” said one former White House official.

Before releasing his video on Thursday, Trump was entirely out of the spotlight, avoiding the press even as he held an event in which he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two golfers. Because of new restrictions from Twitter and Facebook, he had not been unable to tweet. He still can’t post on Facebook.

The work of the administration has nevertheless continued, though in unusual directions. One administration official said he spent part of Thursday trying to help colleagues get approval for title changes—like moving from acting to permanent roles—“just because it obviously looks better on a resume.”

Others in Trump-world spent the day itching to take their Trump White House experience off their resume entirely.

“You go to the White House to work there because you want to serve your country in literally the most amazing building and the most powerful place in the world with the best of intentions and then shit like this happens and you feel embarrassed by it, naturally,” said one of the former White House officials.

Gabby Orr contributed to this article.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

There’s wide consensus among security experts that physical two-factor authentication keys provide the most effective protection against account takeovers. Research published today doesn’t change that thinking, but it does show how malicious attackers with physical possession of a Google Titan key can clone it.

There are some steep hurdles to clear for an attack to be successful. A hacker would first have to steal a target’s account password and also gain covert possession of the physical key for as many as 10 hours. The cloning also requires up to $12,000 worth of equipment and custom software, plus an advanced background in electrical engineering and cryptography. That means the key cloning—were it ever to happen in the wild—would likely be done only by a nation-state pursuing its highest-value targets.

“Nevertheless, this work shows that the Google Titan Security Key (or other impacted products) would not avoid [an] unnoticed security breach by attackers willing to put enough effort into it,” researchers from security firm NinjaLab wrote in a research paper published Thursday. “Users that face such a threat should probably switch to other FIDO U2F hardware security keys, where no vulnerability has yet been discovered.”

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Updated 1:36 p.m. Eastern on January 8, 2020.

The name of God was everywhere during Wednesday’s insurrection against the American government. The mob carried signs and flag declaring Jesus saves! and God, Guns & Guts Made America, Let’s Keep All Three. Some were participants in the Jericho March, a gathering of Christians to “pray, march, fast, and rally for election integrity.” After calling on God to “save the republic” during rallies at state capitols and in D.C. over the past two months, the marchers returned to Washington with flourish. On the National Mall, one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to Say Yes to Jesus. “Shout if you love Jesus!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd cheered louder. The group’s name is drawn from the biblical story of Jericho, “a city of false gods and corruption,” the march’s website says. Just as God instructed Joshua to march around Jericho seven times with priests blowing trumpets, Christians gathered in D.C., blowing shofars, the ram’s horn typically used in Jewish worship, to banish the “darkness of election fraud” and ensure that “the walls of corruption crumble.”

[Read: Mass delusion in America]

The Jericho March is evidence that Donald Trump has bent elements of American Christianity to his will, and that many Christians have obligingly remade their faith in his image. Defiant masses literally broke down the walls of government, some believing they were marching under Jesus’s banner to implement God’s will to keep Trump in the White House. The group’s co-founders are essentially unknown in the organized Christian world. Robert Weaver, an evangelical Oklahoma insurance salesman, was nominated by Trump to lead the Indian Health Service but withdrew after The Wall Street Journal reported that he misrepresented his qualifications. Arina Grossu, who is Catholic, recently worked as a contract communications adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services. (Weaver and Grossu declined to comment. “Jericho March denounces any and all acts of violence and destruction, including any that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021,” a PR spokesperson for the March wrote to me in an email after the publication of this article.) Still, they will have far more influence in shaping the reputation of Christianity for the outside world than many denominational giants: They helped stage a stunning effort to circumvent the 2020 election, all in the name of their faith. White evangelicals, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and 2020. Some of these supporters participated in the attack on the Capitol on Wednesday. But many in the country hold all Trump voters responsible—especially those who lent him the moral authority of their faith.

This realization has shaken Christian leaders. “I certainly did not believe, or have any anticipation, that [Trump] would take matters to the extent that have become clear over the last few weeks,” Albert Mohler, the head of an influential evangelical seminary in Kentucky who hopes to be the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me. Mohler opposed Trump in 2016, citing what he saw as the candidate’s poor character. But last spring, he publicly declared that he would support Trump in 2020 and vote for Republican presidential candidates for the rest of his life. “We are undoubtedly in an agonizing moment, in which evangelical Christians who supported Donald Trump now find ourselves in the position of being tremendously embarrassed by this most recent behavior,” he told me.

[Read: The evangelical reckoning begins]

Mohler said he was shocked by the triumph of the mob on Wednesday. He could not believe that the president had explicitly encouraged this attack on the constitutional process. “Conservatives do not believe there is any excuse, whatsoever, for unleashing what amounts to a destructive rage on the nation,” he said. I asked him whether evangelicals who supported Trump have an obligation to grapple with their role in enabling Trump’s behavior. “I honestly don’t know the extent to which history will record the evangelicals—I’m trying to think of the word you just used for supporting the president. What was the word you just used? Enabling the president,” he said. “I’ve been very clear in my criticism of the president’s bad behavior.” Surely he didn’t vote for this. He couldn’t have known that this is how Trump would end things. But he sees that evangelicals are due for a reckoning in their own house. “Where we find ourselves in the wrong, repentance is always called for.”

[Read: Evangelicalism’s silent majority]

Other evangelical leaders who have mostly stayed silent during Trump’s time in office finally spoke out on Wednesday. “Armed breaching of capitol security behind a confederate flag is anarchy, unAmerican, criminal treason and domestic terrorism. President Trump must clearly tell his supporters ‘We lost. Go home now,’” tweeted Rick Warren, an influential California megachurch pastor.

But it was too late. Someone else had already grabbed the megaphone.

“This is bigger than one election,” Grossu says on the Jericho March website. “This is about protecting free and fair elections for the future and saving America from tyranny.” Paranoid thinking abounded among the protesters in D.C.; the QAnon conspiracy has circulated within some evangelical circles. On Wednesday, the Jericho March account tweeted a screenshot of Trump condemning Vice President Mike Pence for not stopping the certification of the Electoral College votes. “A sad day in America,” it said, along with prayer-hands emojis. The march organizers were not mourning the attack on the Capitol. They were mourning the vice president’s refusal to help the president overturn the election.

Elaine Godfrey contributed reporting.

The Capitol Police are looking extremely bad as the decisions that led to the Capitol being stormed by a Trumpist mob start to get scrutiny. The contrast between the treatment of these domestic terrorists and last summer’s Black Lives Matter protesters was immediately obvious to most observers, and the excuses that have come are not making things any better.

The Capitol Police themselves didn’t respond to questions from The Washington Post, but other law enforcement officials have detailed the lack of response they saw as they watched the invasion in real time. “It’s like watching a real-life horror movie. I mean, we train and plan and budget every day, basically, to have this not happen,” Kim Dine, a former chief of the Capitol Police, said. “How it happened, I can’t figure that out.”

“Capitol Police did have a plan, but apparently they assumed business as usual,” an unnamed law enforcement official told the Post. “They didn’t expect Trump to incite them and that they would forcefully push their way in. Bottom line, there just wasn’t enough personnel to prevent a mob from pushing in.”

But here’s the thing: Saying “we didn’t know they would seriously invade the Capitol” is no excuse. It’s simply a statement that the Capitol Police gave this group special treatment ahead of time—when leaders didn’t plan to stop them from storming the Capitol—and regretted it afterward. 

These domestic terrorists were public about their plans, and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser started warning the city’s residents about the potential for violence days ahead of time. A District official described the realization that “this could be a stadium-sized crowd—a full-fledged Trump rally, and much bigger than anything we had seen previously.” 

But “even as people poured into downtown Washington midmorning Wednesday, Capitol Police officials assured D.C. police leaders that they felt comfortable with their security setup, according to a senior District law enforcement official,” the Post reports. Once again, the failure to defend the Capitol building and the members of Congress and staff and other workers within it was a decision made at the top of the department. The individual police officers who took selfies with domestic terrorists or opened gates to allow them inside are a problem, but they are not the source of the problem.

Congress is taking notice. “There was not supposed to be anyone near the Capitol. You would be reasonably close, to be able to protest and express your view, but nobody belongs on the Capitol plaza, nobody ever goes on the Capitol steps, that is an illegal act. ... Those were illegal acts, and those people should have been immediately arrested,” Rep. Tim Ryan told reporters. He made the likely outcome explicit, saying “I think it’s pretty clear that there are going to be a number of people who are going to be without employment very, very soon.”

Those people who are without employment should include people at the decision-making level, the people who treated this known, explicit threat so much more casually than Black Lives Matter protesters have been treated in cities across the country over recent years, and at the Capitol itself.

“If Black people had done what these White domestic terrorists did today, can you imagine the reaction? They would have been tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, arrested, and charged with felonies—or treason,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump said in a statement. “Another tragic display of our two systems of justice.”

Once the Capitol Police had made the disastrous mistake of failing to prepare for what was coming, they and other law enforcement agencies spent the ensuing hours playing catch up. We’re told that there weren’t more arrests because “There just weren’t enough personnel to do everything.” But again, the insufficient personnel was a decision someone made.

The National Guard was eventually called in, a last resort after Bowser had tried to prevent a repeat of last summer’s armed federal occupation of the District. Again, though, you have to wonder if officials at every level would have worked so hard to avoid the images of armed troops in the Capitol if they’d been dealing with a racial justice protest. And when the Capitol Police did request backup, the Pentagon took its time with that request.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but the people looking into it—including members of Congress who were themselves under direct threat during the invasion of the Capitol—need to consider the lack of preparation not as an “oops” but as a decision, an assessment that Trump’s supporters would not pose the threat that they had for weeks been telling everyone they would absolutely pose, given the chance.

Democrats say they want action. Key Republicans are hoping to just wait things out.

Politicians’ attention is increasingly turning to the question of whether action should be taken against President Donald Trump before his term in office expires on January 20 after Wednesday’s presidentially incited chaos surrounding Joe Biden’s win formally getting recognized by Congress.

Soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called Thursday for officials to “immediately invoke” the 25th Amendment, deeming Trump “unable” to serve and stripping him of his powers. If that doesn’t happen, he said, “Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”

Soon afterward, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has the power to start the impeachment process, somewhat agreed — she said that unless the 25th Amendment is invoked, “the Congress may be prepared to move forward with impeachment.” That’s not a concrete commitment, and currently the House has no plans to reconvene until after Biden’s inauguration — but plans can change.

To have any practical effect, either of these actions against Trump would need to win the support of key Republicans. In the case of the 25th Amendment, Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of Trump’s Cabinet would have to make the call. And for impeachment, at least 18 Republican senators would have to vote to remove Trump from office.

Neither of those currently appears likely.

Wednesday’s events did reportedly spur chatter among Republican officials about invoking the 25th Amendment. But on Thursday, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced she would resign, saying she was “deeply troubled” by the storming of the Capitol and Trump’s role in it. Once this resignation is effective, it means Chao would no longer be able to have a role in a 25th Amendment effort.

As for impeachment, House Democrats have the power to impeach Trump (again) and they may well do so. But all that does is kick the matter to the Senate. And as far as removing Trump from office, the only Senate Republican who voted to do so last time — Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) — indicated that he doesn’t support doing so now, suggesting, “I think we’ve got to just hold our breath” until Trump’s term is up.

The wild card here would be if Trump’s erratic, lawless behavior escalates further. Leading Republicans have made clear they support the transition of power to Biden. Trump, in an early Thursday morning statement, promised to abide by that. But he could change his mind. And if he does, both the 25th Amendment option and impeachment-and-removal are potential responses.

”If something else happens, all options would be on the table,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Thursday.

A second impeachment?

The reason Schumer said Congress might have to “reconvene” is because after the stressful day and late night counting the electoral votes, both the House and Senate had planned not to come back into session until the very end of Trump’s presidency.

So, it appears, the initial response planned by congressional leaders was indeed to do nothing, to wait things out over the next 13 days and hope for the best.

But many in both parties were outraged that Trump’s incitement of a mob to storm the Capitol would result in no consequences for him, and some Democrats began calling for the strongest congressional response to a president abusing his power: impeachment.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports that House Judiciary Committee Democrats began circulating drafts of potential new articles of impeachment Thursday, with one draft accusing Trump of willfully inciting violence against the US government.

By midday Thursday, both Schumer and Pelosi were at least rhetorically on board, with Pelosi citing “the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus” as a reason. Yet both framed impeachment as a fallback plan. Their true hope, they said, was that Vice President Pence and the Cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment and strip Trump of his powers.

However, neither Schumer nor Pelosi laid out a timetable by which Pence and the Cabinet had to take this action. And Pelosi did not concretely promise to pursue impeachment even if they took no action — she said the House “may be prepared to move forward with impeachment.”

So it’s not yet clear whether Pelosi will pursue a second impeachment of Trump in the 13 days remaining before Biden’s inauguration. If she and her caucus truly wanted to, they certainly could.

But impeachment itself has no practical consequence other than kicking the matter to the Senate. As far as when and how a trial would be held, Mitch McConnell is still majority leader until Georgia’s special election results are certified later this month, meaning he and Republicans would call the shots. And while Republican senators did overwhelmingly reject Trump’s attempt to steal the election in this week’s votes, it’s unlikely that they would go so far as voting to remove him from office.

Perhaps that would change if Trump’s behavior devolves even further into lawlessness, but even Romney wasn’t enthusiastic about the possibility when questioned Wednesday. “I think time is a little short for that,” he told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic, referring to impeachment.

It’s also possible that impeachment for the currently known facts could spur wavering Republicans to rally back to Trump’s side and defend him as his term ends. Though some leading Republicans are more critical of Trump than at any time in his presidency, Trump’s support in the party obviously has not evaporated overnight — after the storming of the Capitol, more than half of House Republicans voted to throw out the election results in states Biden won.

The 25th Amendment seems unlikely (again, unless Trump escalates further)

As I wrote Wednesday, the key decision-makers in invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment — which would strip Trump of his powers and make Pence acting president — are Pence and the Trump administration Cabinet secretaries.

Theoretically, the 25th Amendment has some advantages over impeachment. It only requires signoff from a handful of people and goes into effect immediately, if Pence and a majority of secretaries declare that Trump is “unable” to exercise the powers and duties of his office, and transmit that declaration to congressional leaders. Trump can dispute the decision, but if Pence and the secretaries reiterate their judgment, Congress would have 21 days to settle the matter — more days than are remaining in Trump’s term.

Of course, that’s how it’s legally supposed to work — but Section 4 has never actually been invoked, so the practical implementation could be much messier, and could feel a lot like a coup (particularly to people like, say, those Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol).

This is a failsafe that remains available should Trump escalate the situation further. But under current circumstances, Pence and Republican Cabinet secretaries seem unlikely to go down this road. And Sen. Graham said Thursday that he doesn’t think the 25th Amendment would be “appropriate,” in a sign of where Republican opinion is leaning — though he also said that “all options would be on the table” should something else happen.

So after Wednesday’s chaos, this appears to be where things stand: Leading Republicans think the country has survived nearly four years of Trump’s presidency, and they’re going to hope to get through 13 more days.