10 I 2021: The new organized crime

What the assault on the Capitol has demonstrated is that America has produced a new type of organized crime. There were plenty of evidence of politico-criminal organizations, going all the way back to the emergence of the “militias” and the “gun rights” crazies. Recent years have brought QAnon, White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, et al. But ignorance, inertia, and cowardice caused us to turn a blind eye to these avowed terrorists. Then Trump came along and energized them, giving them the implied approval of the President of the United States and of his propagandists in the media. From then on we’ve had riots, attacks on state capitol buildings, a scheme to kidnap a governor, and finally January 6th. These groups are criminal insurrectionists in-waiting, and when summoned by their Leader, they gathered in Washington and did what they have been talking about doing for a very long time. 

Citizens who monitor hate groups’ communications on the internet saw the Washington insurrection coming well in advance. The Justice Dept. and FBI have access to the same internet material. So why was government so completely unprepared for the insurrection. Are they so naïve? Are they so ill-informed? The FBI has nearly eliminated the Mafia through gathering of intelligence, the RICO act, and prompt and determined action. The same resources can be turned against domestic terrorists, so one has to ask “Why not?”

Was Trump’s alliance with these groups responsible for the unpreparedness of police and national guard and for the great delay in mobilizing the national guard? Trump and his regime not only tolerate domestic terrorists and their lawlessness, but foster them in order to create a constant threat of civil violence. Now it is time to crack down on the terrorists.

Multiple veins of criminality run through all of these groups. If appropriate diligence is applied to monitoring them and their criminal communications, and if all criminal acts are investigated and prosecuted, the threat from these violent associations could be very much reduced. I would say that doing this is a necessary precondition to the exorcism of American politics.

10 I 2021: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, dum, dum

I saw a photograph of four of the dozens of self-styled militia men who held a demonstration of their mental instability on the lawn of the Kentucky Capitol Building. They were there to “Stop the steal!,” to denounce Mitch McConnell, cheer for the DC insurrectionists, and rage against Kentucky’s Governor Beshear, not to mention against socialism and communism (do they know what these words mean?).

The four in the photo are standing there in let’s-play-soldier outfits, armed with various long guns, and with their faces covered, not by COVID-19 masks, but by scarves wrapped round and round their necks and heads to make a mask like a  KKK hood. These nerds are really dangerous. They are hyper-aggressive, self-righteous, and stupid. They are also, as human beings go, ridiculous and pathetic.

They are not the only ones who are ridiculous and pathetic. We have allowed our laws to be so misinterpreted and twisted that these heavily armed hooligans can parade around, their presence and appearance making an implicit threat of insurrection. 

9 I 2021: Question and suggestion

Is Rudy Giulliani, Trump’s spieler, still out of jail?

Senator Hawley is unrepentant for the melodrama he staged. He says he “will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections.” Oh my!

1)   “Integrity of our elections” is, of course, crucial to our democracy, so all Americans share concerns about the integrity of our elections, but that’s not what Hawley is talking about.

2)   He’s giving voice to the disappointed and delusional people who are echoing Trump’s claim of a stolen election. This claim has been echoed also by some cynical politicians who know very well that Trump’s claim is false. Has Hawley ever said that these people, politicians, and President Trump are absolutely wrong?

3)   “Giving voice,” as if we have not been hearing “rigged election” bullshit since even before Trump lost the election.

Hawley should shove his fist where it can’t be seen.

8 I 2021: Comments

Trump now reminds me of the emperors Caligula and Nero who ended their reigns as dangerous psychotics.

Today’s paper offered images of staff removing trash from the House floor. Who will remove those in the House and Senate who tried to interfere with the counting of the electoral votes?

6 I 2021: Today’s attack on the United States

Well, as with all things that come from Trump, I am disgusted but not surprised. Trump sent his virtual brownshirts to shut down Congress, and that’s just what they did. 

I do wonder why the Capitol Police and the D.C. Police were so completely unprepared to deal with this riot? There were many indications that such a thing could happen, was likely to happen, and, once Trump gave his harangue in the morning, they should have known that it was sure to happen.

Who exactly were the Trump supporters who attacked the Senate and House of Representatives? I examined photos of the rioters and did not see many of what I would call polite people. There were a lot of guys, many of them short, many of them a bit overweight, most of them sporting beards and baseball caps. They looked like the sort of people the peak of whose social lives is gun and knife shows. In films of some of the attacks it was clear that most of these men were just looking for a fight, any fight, just seeking to smash something, anything, just wanting to be bad little boys and impress the other bad little boys. In England they would be football hooligans.

And in interstices of the t.v. coverage I saw Josh Hawley raising his fist to show his solidarity with the mob and Ted Cruz looking and talking like a lounge lizard. These good ol’ boys pretend to believe Trump’s Great Lie. They both know damned well that Trump lost the election, but they want to have a commission to look into irregularities. 

What bullshit! Hawley and Cruz pretend to represent the many voters who are suspicious about the results of the election. These voters are suspicious because they were told untruths again and again. If some voters believed that the moon is composed of green cheese, Hawley and Cruz would call for a commission to examine the moon.

6 I 2021: Pharmacist believed lies

These words, “Pharmacist believed lies,” are the subheading of the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s report of the arrest of pharmacist Steven Brandenburg, an employee of the Advocate Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, because he intentionally spoiled 57 vials, that’s 500+ doses, of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Brandenburg, a devotee of conspiracy theories, tried to destroy the vaccine because he believed the shots would cause mutations in patients’ DNA. The report in the Post concludes: “Misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines has surged online with false claims on everything from the vaccine’s ingredients to its possible side effects.” We have to hope that misinformation about the vaccine does not lead to others’ deranged behavior.

Now, rewrite this subheading to read “Public believed lies” and you could then go on to write an account of the popular furor about the presidential election. Large numbers of citizens have been tricked by planned programs of disinformation to believe that victory in the election was stolen from Donald Trump. We cannot say that some voters just “voted with their feelings” or that they reached different conclusions from the evidence. The agitated voters were DECEIVED, they believed the misinformation, i.e., the lies, spread by Trump and his supporters.

So, Mr. Brandenburg believed lies and destroyed desperately needed vaccine. A tremendous number of voters believe lies and are trying to destroy our democracy. Of course, Brandenburg and the Trumpies must bear their share of responsibility for what they do, but far greater guilt belongs to those who told the lies that deceived them and to the media that promiscuously or designedly transmitted them. 

We are victims of our “freedoms.” The freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment has been twisted to mean not freedom, but an unconstrained license for speech, however dangerous, however divisive, however obscene, and however false. Similarly, the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment has been misconstrued and abused. There are so many unregulated firearms in circulation that any fool can get a gun, and any gun, for any purpose. 

How might Americans go about limiting these “freedoms”? Will we see any public figures who could start the bringing these abuses born of a childish notion of freedom under control. But I think that without some rational constraint, freedom will be our undoing.

5 I 2021: Trump’s quislings

Quisling is the surname of Vidkun Quisling, fascist dictator of Norway who collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazi invaders in WWII. His name soon became and remains a common noun meaning one who betrays his nation by collaborating with an occupying enemy. Some have applied the term to Donald Trump because of his slavish accommodations of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. But I want to name a few more people in American politics who could be called quislings. I begin with the premise that Trump is a virtual dictator and that Trumpism is an anti-democratic ideology and hostile occupying force. 

So who are our quislings? Surely the Republicans in Congress cannot escape the opprobrium that attaches to slavish collaborators who have betrayed American democracy. The Republican Party was already bankrupt, so Trump bought it up cheap. Some amoral Republicans found Trumpism congenial. Many more thought they would find Trump and Trumpism useful, i.e., it could keep them in office. Others who found Trump and Trumpism offensive went along and kept silence because they were afraid of persecution by Trump and because the Republican Party has long been a lock-step institution.

Then there are Trump’s appointees. His White House staff had quislings in it from the first and recruited ever more quislings to replace the honest people who were driven out. The incompetents and saboteurs whom Trump appointed and continues to appoint to important government positions are quislings whose loyalty to country had been displaced by loyalty to Trump. Mitch McConnell and his Republican Senate without hesitation or thought rubber stamped Trump’s appointments to the judiciary. Some of these judges are fine jurists, some of them are surely incompetent ideologues who will be quislings.

Now we have some notable quislings coming to the fore. When Rep. Louie Gohmert’s attempt to undo the recent election was thwarted in court, Louie then declared “Basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you’ve got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.” Louie cannot be criminally prosecuted for incitement to violence on the basis of these words alone, but they add a shine to his reputation as a quisling.

Then we have Missouri’s disgrace, Senator Josh Hawley, who is promoting Trump’s “lost cause” in order to flatter Trump and his base and make that base his own. Hawley knows America’s democratic institutions and procedures very well, and has pledged again and again his commitment to preserve them. Looks like he changed his mind and decided it is in his interest to be a quisling.

A late-comer to the quisling squad is Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, a veteran sleaze and every bit as ambitious as Hawley. So I would have expected the other quislings to ask him to stand down because of his malodorous reputation. But no, anyone who in his heart wants to be a quisling is welcome.

Trump’s defeat will not make these quislings go away, so we had better recognize them for what they are.

3 I 2021: A true prophecy

NiNi Harris, the distinguished historian of St. Louis, in her book A Most Unsettled State: First Person Accounts of St. Louis During the Civil War provides excerpts from the journal of Louis Philip Fusz, St. Louis resident and secessionist. In the entry for 8 May 1864, Fusz denounces Lincoln for the injuries he believed Lincoln had done to the country. At the end of his list of injuries, however, Fusz corrects himself as follows: “On the moral side I was going to name the debasement of the people, their loss of the spirit of freedom, their baseness, but one thought convinces me that with the mass of Americans, he [Lincoln] is not the cause; that they themselves were in that condition for a long time past and that all their blustering and bragging about their freedom, their self respect, etc. were only loud proclamations to things they felt they possessed no more.”  I find these words distressing, for if we substitute Trump for Lincoln, Fusz is describing Americans of our time far more accurately than those of whom he was writing. 

3 I 2021: Trump and Graham enslaved

There are two questions that have been on my mind all through the dark years of Trump. The first is “What does Putin have on Trump?” that is, it looks like Putin facilitated Trump’s election because he could compel Trump to act in ways harmful to the national interest and supportive of the Russian dictator. 

There were allegations early on that the Russians were holding over Trump’s head some acts of perversion committed during a visit to Moscow. But, as we’ve seen, charges of sexual misbehavior mean nothing to Trump and to his deeply religious base. Did the Russians discover that he had stolen a lot of money in the course of his business dealings? That wouldn’t matter to Trump who is a seasoned grifter, and his base seems to applaud such behavior.

I can only guess, and I come up with four possible explanations of Trump’s behavior.

1)    The Russians can prove that Trump committed some very grave crime, perhaps murder or some other crime so abhorrent that even his base would react negatively.

2)    The Russians can prove that Trump has had Mafia support, or Trump is liable to prosecution beyond American jurisdiction for criminal acts in international commerce.

3)    Maybe Trump owes Putin or people known to Putin a truly fabulous sum of money, so much that he could never repay it, or so much that general knowledge of it and to whom he owes it would finish Trump.

4)    Finally, maybe Trump has a crush on Putin and has taken every opportunity to make his beloved look good and everyone else look bad.

But will we ever know?

The second question is 

“What does Trump have on Lindsey Graham?”

When Trump took office, this occasionally independent-minded and temperate senator enslaved himself to Donald Trump, seeming to say as did Caliban to Stefano:

     Do that good mischief which may make this island

     Thine own for ever, and I, thy Caliban,

     For aye thy foot-licker.

Was Trump able to blackmail Graham and compel him to obey, virtually altering his personality? There have been queries for years about Graham’s sexual orientation, but that doesn’t matter at all to Graham’s supporters. What could he have done so terrible that its becoming known to the public had to be prevented at all costs?

Maybe Graham’s sin was becoming a slave to his status as prominent senator. Did Trump threated to “primary” Graham? I’m sure he did. Trump will sooner or later have threatened to “primary” everyone. We may never know why Lindsey Graham set career before country and self-respect, but the fact of his doing so is certain. 

2 I 2021: Just because a man is crazy …

I read that a former convict, Cody A. Cape of Omaha, under investigation for hunting deer illegally in a federal wildlife refuge, was planning to murder the Federal Wildlife Officer involved in the investigation.

Cape had done prison time, is a scofflaw, is hostile to police, is, to say the least, erratic in his handling of guns, and is obviously mentally unbalanced. Should such a person be allowed to own firearms? Well, common sense says No! 

But, come on, this is America, after all, and if we take away Cody Cape’s guns we would in fairness have to confiscate the firearms of thousands upon thousands of gun owners who are just like Cody. We’d have to disarm the so-called militias, disarm the wanna-be “soldiers of fortune” who show up in “tactical” accoutrements making a display of weapons at public events, disarm the throngs of mentally unstable men who roam our inner cities and shoot first and think later, if at all.

I could go on, but let me conclude by saying: If we were to confiscate guns belonging to citizens like Cody Cape, it just wouldn’t be America any more.