Meanwhile, word spreads through the crowd that some demonstrators have managed to get inside. It’s not entirely surprising—the police have hardly been present the whole time, and their interest only seemed to dissipate as the hours passed. The news is received warmly by the people on the steps. After a few minutes, a mass exodus—apparently spontaneous—is underway. I follow the wave away from the building, figuring there must be good reason for departure. As we move, news is quickly passed around that a woman has been shot by police inside.

While thousands leave, at least as many linger. Though Pence has been gone for quite a while—he evacuated when Congress did—one of those who stays is taunting him in a singsong voice: “Mikey, I’ve heard rumors about you.” Chatter in the crowd indicates it’s an accusation of pedophilia—a running theme among the gathered demonstrators.

On the train ride home—the car packed for the first time in months—one woman tells an attentive audience that she’s seen video online of John Roberts raping a young girl then shooting her in the head. Meanwhile, another—well-dressed, in her 60s, and sitting with her husband—reads aloud from Facebook on her phone. The rioters who invaded the Capitol building were not Trump supporters at all, she says. They were Antifa and BLM infiltrators, each and every one of them. Nothing violent or illegal was done by any of the thousands whose indignation was so clear, so forceful all around the building. This can’t have been us. We should not believe anything to the contrary.

A third woman overhears her too, and relays the story in a whisper to her companion. “She said it was BLM.” Her jaw clenched in anger that’s evident in her voice, I think at first that she’s outraged at the audacity of the claim. I turn, as subtly as I can, to catch a glimpse of her friend (who’s sitting behind me), and see she’s decked out in MAGA gear. Their fury—hardly directed where I assumed—quickly gives way to an odd kind of relief. In an instant they have been absolved, and the news spreads like wildfire through the car.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-i-saw-at-the-capitol/

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WASHINGTON — Democrats laid the groundwork on Friday for impeaching President Trump a second time, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California threatened to bring him up on formal charges if he did not resign “immediately” over his role in inciting a violent mob attack on the Capitol this week.

The threat was part of an all-out effort by furious Democrats, backed by a handful of Republicans, to pressure Mr. Trump to leave office in disgrace after the hourslong siege by his supporters on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Although he has only 12 days left in the White House, they argued he was a direct danger to the nation.

Ms. Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders continued to press Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to wrest power from Mr. Trump, though Mr. Pence was said to be against it. The speaker urged Republican lawmakers to pressure the president to resign immediately. And she took the unusual step of calling Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss how to limit Mr. Trump’s access to the nation’s nuclear codes and then publicized it.

“If the president does not leave office imminently and willingly, the Congress will proceed with our action,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to colleagues.

At least one Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, followed Ms. Pelosi’s lead and told The Anchorage Daily News that she was considering leaving the Republican Party altogether because of Mr. Trump.

“I want him out,” she said. “He has caused enough damage.”

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/politics/democrats-trump-impeachment.html

Please, Donald, go away. Quietly... Golf sounds good...

As I write this, pro-Trump protesters have stormed the U.S. Capitol building seeking to impose Trump’s attempted coup on America. Trump’s hand in stoking the coup is apparent on multiple fronts. He’s been disseminating and mainstreaming baseless electoral fraud conspiracies for months – years really. He encouraged these protesters to head over to Capitol Hill. Once the attacks on and invasion of the Capitol began, he refused to condemn them. And then in his first address to the nation, he poured more fuel on the fire by continuing to traffic in electoral fraud conspiracies. To be perfectly clear, this is not only a coup effort, but one that is being directed by the President of the United States.

How did we get here? And why is any of this a surprise to the legions of fascism deniers in the U.S. who have long insisted that the U.S. is not falling into authoritarian politics? Nothing about what’s happened in the capital should be a surprise to those who have taken a sober look at the rising fascism that now characterizes American politics.

Trump told the nation that he would not accept the results of an election he lost before a single ballot was counted on election day. And he has been leading an effort on countless fronts to overturn the results for the last two months, in the states, in the judicial branch, in Congress, and now in the streets.

The President was caught trying to extort the Georgian Secretary of State by threatening criminal prosecution if he refused to manufacture 11,780 votes, thereby handing Donald Trump a “victory” in the state. This was the second time in a year and a half – the other being the Ukraine scandal – in which Trump tried to extort a political official for electoral gain. Trump’s coup also includes his demand that Congress and Vice President Mike Pence hand Trump the presidency, rather than certifying Biden’s win.

Trump’s dealings with Pence, Ukraine, and the Georgian Secretary of State reflect a fiefdom-style politics in which other political leaders are deemed little more than a means to an end for the President’s personal political aggrandizement. Trump views his interactions with others as an opportunity for personal profit and as instrumental to achieving his own ends. But with this attempted coup, Trump’s politics extend beyond simple corruption and clientelism. His attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election represent a fundamental threat to democracy itself. Because of his conspiratorial propaganda, more than three-quarters of Republicans believe that the election was marked by “widespread voter fraud.” And many are now taking to the streets and engaging in violence and terrorism to overturn the election. Considering recent events, there’s just no way to know how bad this is all going to get moving forward when it comes to the survival of the republic.

Sadly, this fascist threat has been consistently downplayed every step of the way. Being intimately familiar with the mainstream academic work on fascism and the professors who produce it, I can confidently say that there are few American scholars who are willing to openly call Trump a fascist, and even fewer scholars who are willing to publicly claim that the U.S. political system contains elements of fascism.

American journalists have also been squeamish about the “fascism” designation when it comes to their reporting on Trump. A review of the Nexis Uni academic database reveals that from Presidential election to election – from November 8, 2016 to November 3, 2020 – the terms “fascism” or “fascist” appeared in relation to “Trump” in a total of 627 articles in the “paper of record” – The New York Times. The terms “authoritarian” or “authoritarianism” were far more common, appearing in 1,807 articles, or roughly three times as often as discussions of fascism, in relation to Trump. The least offensive and less incendiary terms “populist” and “populism” were far and away the most common in relation to Trump, appearing in 3,422 articles, or nearly five-and-a-half times as often as the fascist/fascism labels [1]. To summarize, U.S. journalists have routinely avoided attacks from the right by avoiding calling Trump a fascist, while deterring discussions of fascism in American politics.

The U.S. has a long history of denialism when it comes to recognizing the dangers of fascistic politics, at home and abroad. We can look back nearly a century to the writings of Sinclair Lewis for a recognition of the “It Can’t Happen Here” willful denialism that has long characterized U.S. political culture.

U.S. discourse is defined by simplistic “fascism-not fascism” and “authoritarian-not authoritarian” binaries, which do a massive disservice to our understanding of the threats to republican governance and democratic electoralism. These dichotomies are not geared toward a good faith discourse on the fascism-authoritarianism question, because they are almost never followed by serious journalistic or scholarly engagements with the available evidence regarding whether the U.S. is slipping into fascistic or authoritarian politics. Rather, these binary frameworks are often used in derisory ways to reject out of hand the use of the fascist classification in U.S. politics. These binaries prohibit any coherent, nuanced, or thoughtful discussion of the matter, since these approaches, by design, cannot recognize that authoritarianism and fascism are real until they are fully consolidated and mature features of U.S. politics. And now that this seditious insurrection has spilled into the streets, the moral bankruptcy of fascist denialism is on display for all to see.

Henry Giroux deals thoughtfully with the authoritarian-fascism question by recognizing that the U.S. contains elements of both neoliberal and fascist politics. In other words, it’s not an either-or choice between the two. One can call our political system neoliberal fascist, neofascistic, creeping fascist, para/proto-fascist or whatever. Regardless of the qualifier that we choose, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fascist politics that is embraced by this administration. Prior to the attempted coup at the Capitol, there was already an alarmingly long list of transgressions from the Trump administration:

+ Trump’s militant and ritualistic contempt for basic notions of truth, facts, and evidence-based scientific and medical reasoning, coupled with a blind and cultist public devotion to the president via the admission of nearly two-thirds of his supporters that there is nothing he could do to lose their support.

+ Trump’s white nationalist politics and blanket demonization of Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, rapists,” and as a national security threat. This xenophobia is clearly racist in orientation, considering Trump’s contempt for darker skinned immigrants, alongside a preference for white immigrants – as evidenced by his marriage to a white first-generation European.

+ His (failed) attempt to use the military to put down Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, which faced stiff opposition from military leadership. Trump’s interest in using security forces to suppress dissent was hardly abstract, considering his administration’s use of police state-style undercover federal officials and unmarked vans to abduct BLM protesters, and Trump’s own gassing of non-violent protesters in Lafayette Park outside the gates of the White House, which allowed the Bible-toting POTUS to clear away onlookers as he secured a photo op in front of St. John’s Church.

+ His circumventing of Congress and governing by executive order, via the illegal confiscation of taxpayer funds for his wall, coupled with the declaration of a “national emergency” to justify his illegal actions. This use of funds was never authorized by Congress and represented a blatant abuse of the constitutional principle of checks and balances.

+ Trump’s introduction of a needlessly punitive and destructive child-parent separation policy against unauthorized immigrants. This was coupled with his reliance on concentration camp-style mass detainment, which was characterized by dangerous overcrowding, children imprisoned in cages, and the denial of basic needs such as soap, toothpaste, and medical treatment to detainees.

+ His radical crackdown on legal immigration to the U.S., which was cut by a staggering 50 percent during Trump’s term, coupled with the growth in unauthorized immigrant arrests and detainments by 30 percent compared to Obama, and by more than 100 percent compared to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, despite comparable levels of deportations under Obama and Trump.

+ Trump’s (failed) attempt(s) to have immigrants “gassed, electrified, and shot” in mass and to illegally shut down immigration in total at the Mexican border. These orders were ignored by horrified officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who he promised would be pardoned for their illegal acts if they were ever prosecuted.

+ His propagandistic and baseless demonization of the Democrats for “stealing” the 2020 election, coupled with his own (failed) judicial, state-based, and congressional efforts to pull off an electoral coup by repealing the outcome of the election. This strategy involved nearly 60 lawsuits attempting to overrule state electoral results, and meetings with more than 300 state legislators across nearly a half dozen battleground states in which Trump schemed to overrule popular votes that favored Biden.

+ Trump’s faux Social Darwinian disaster politics, which embrace a “herd immunity,” survival of the fittest philosophy that has actively sought to infect Americans in mass with a killer virus, despite Trump’s own access to cutting edge life-saving Covid drugs and treatments to which the vast majority of Americans have no access. This “let it be” approach, one recent Columbia University study concluded, may have resulted in an excess of deaths that is 60 percent higher than what would have been expected had the federal government and states seriously responded to the crisis.

+ The paranoid and delusional eliminationist rhetoric Trump has embraced against his political enemies, portraying them as a threat to national security that needs to be snuffed out, and as recently reflected in his demand that the Justice Department arrest and prosecute top Democrats including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton based on false conspiratorial claims that they tried to undertake a coup against his administration. There is more than a bit of irony and projection at work here, considering Trump’s own relentless efforts over the last few months to initiate a coup against the incoming Biden administration.

Anyone who looks at this list and concludes that this was business as usual, or who is surprised about what happened in Washington D.C., is engaged in an act of delusion of epic proportions. Considering these developments, it is increasingly absurd to refer to Trump’s politics as anything less than fascist. The path forward is increasingly clear. This president needs to be impeached and removed from office as soon as possible. Trump needs to be charged with treason, for his role in orchestrating this attempted coup. Anything less sets a dangerous precedent for future attempts to overthrow what little is left of American democracy.

Read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/07/the-coup-in-washington-why-is-anyone-surprised-by-trumps-fascist-politics/print/

----------------------

Yes. At this stage despite all this crap-Trump mentioned by Counterpunch, Trump was likely to be re-elected had his Covid-19 management been a tad better. 

Going through the list above, some of history has been rewritten to suit the situation. Since 2016 Trump's election, the Democrats have been relentless, I mean RELENTLESS, at claiming the elections were stolen by Trump with the (unproven) help of the Russians and drove a useless but ANNOYING Mueller investigation, plus many "quasi-fascist" anti-fascist (antifa) protests. President Trump was betrayed for asking information about Biden's crooked deals ("and son of a bitch, I got the investigator sacked") in Ukraine which led to his impeachment. 

On immigration we have to remember that “While President Bush’s so-called get-tough strategy clearly did not do enough to remove illegal workers, President Obama’s strategy is much worse,” said Representative Elton Gallegly, Republican of California, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee. Of course, Trump's awful decisions in immigration were supported by most Americans...

Trump had no notions of truth. Sure. NO politician has any notion of truth. Joe Biden has polished a few porkers himself in the past and Obama got lucky most of the "liberal" media was blind.

On another score, Trump is the only president since WW2 not to have started a new war. Yes, he has another 11 days to go and time to muck this up and anything is possible — especially with Pompeo eager to shit on another country, not to mention Iran. 

Trump has been a grand idiot, unable to learn the refinement of office. But he was not helped by the GOP either, most of the members hated him for being Trump. Until Covid-19 came in, More "Amerikans" than less would have voted him back in.

Good bye Donald, you had your four years in the sunshine and you stoke hell. The swamp is still the swamp. Time to go... and shut up... Let Biden damage his own grand designs or succeed in is old age... May he continues to foster peace in the world.

The crowd was rushing in. Nearly everyone with the power to stop it seemed caught by surprise.

Now, more than a week after the stunning Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many former security officials remain mystified by one question: Why did the vast resources of federal law enforcement result in no threat assessment of what was coming?

It would have come in the form of a joint intelligence bulletin: a report prepared by the FBI and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis that would have given Capitol police, D.C. cops, and others information about what was in store.

The bulletin itself is a nearly perfunctory assessment done before any major event, ranging from the Super Bowl to a large protest. One was reportedly issued on Jan. 13, in advance of the Biden inauguration.

The lack of such a bulletin in advance of Jan. 6 shocked former government officials.

Across conversations with multiple former DHS officials and analysts, TPM found that a top-down aversion from the Trump administration towards addressing the threat of far-right extremism, inept management, and the dismantling of DHS bureaucracies aimed at coordinating, analyzing, and disseminating information about extremist groups contributed to the lack of warning.

“Nobody wanted to write a formal intelligence report about this, in part out of fear that such a report would be very poorly received by the MAGA folks within DHS,” one former DHS official who served in the Trump administration told TPM, on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

The acting head of the FBI’s Washington field office defended the bureau’s preparation on Tuesday, saying that agents in part were tasked with sifting through months of online threats with no indication of what was puffery and what was real. NBC reported on Wednesday that that field office had received an “F” grade in an internal FBI evaluation on its ability to fight domestic terrorism.

Multiple former officials described a climate of fear within DHS around reporting threats from the far right, specifically within the Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A).

I&A was created after 9/11 to process and share information and intelligence gathered by federal agencies at the state and local level.

Over the years, it became a lynchpin of national efforts to monitor domestic terrorist threats, analyze the information, and disseminate it to law enforcement around the country. That’s exactly the kind of information-sharing which would have resulted in a joint intelligence bulletin warning ahead of Jan. 6.

Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy, pointed out that FBI and DHS produced a JIB before the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

“Somebody was doing something back then, at least,” she said.

Neumann, who left DHS in April 2020 and endorsed Joe Biden in summer 2020, added that, in the years since 2017, DHS officials had steered I&A away from far-right extremism, leaving that issue to the FBI.

“That was a distinct shift from how DHS had operated in the past,” 

Read more:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/why-dhs-failed-to-warn-the-country-about-jan-6

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This article above is full of bullshit...

The "intelligence" agencies that know exactly when Rouhani has a fart — or can assassinate with precision an Iranian General — had no idea about "the storming of the Bastille"?

To use the cliché, let's demand that our other leg be pulled and it will ring...

Say the protest would have been a peaceful demonstration... Who benefits? Trump.

Say the protest turns ugly. who benefits? The Democrats who can also coax the Republican lawmakers into voting Joe Biden without any second thoughts and at the same time, the Democrats can point the finger at the Republicans lawmakers who "supported" the protest...

You don't understand yet?

The "intelligence" agencies hate Trump's guts. By nature, "intelligence" agencies are DEVIOUS. They are well practiced at shit-stirring. It's their bread and butter in other countries... Why not use the same tactics at home? They have their "agents provocateurs" in the crowd. These are well versed in psychological manipulations of crowds. Only a few words, not even shouted, can change an individual next to them from a law-abiding "protester" into a "stormer". The "agents provocateurs" are well-versed into recognising borderline characters that can "flip". One or two stirred individuals can lead to the "storming of the Capitol"... A win for the Lawmakers who shit in their pants, yet the protest does not go the full hog because the "agents provocateurs" know how to make the crowd pull back. if the crowd did not "pull back", Martial Law would have been declared by Trump. The "agents provocateurs" could not let this happen... The crowd was "dispersed"... after having been used to the "intelligence" agencies advantage — agencies fully working for the Democrats. Meanwhile Trump did not have the confidence of the armed forces, nor the police, nor the home guards. All were against him. He could do nothing but blabber something about "go home in peace". He had to know he had been outmanoeuvred.

If you don't understand any of this, go and play with your plastic hippos...

...

Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, a far-right nationalist group that is a major target of the sprawling investigation into the riot at the Capitol this month, has a history of cooperating with law enforcement, according to court records and a former prosecutor.

The stunning revelation that Mr. Tarrio, who leads one of the country’s most notorious extremist groups, helped the F.B.I. and local police departments go after more than a dozen criminal defendants about a decade ago was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday. 

The news emerged as Mr. Tarrio himself has fallen under scrutiny for his role in encouraging the Proud Boys to attend a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, after which a mob of hundreds broke into the Capitol, disrupting the final certification of the presidential election.

“Mr. Tarrio was a cooperator — like many who seek to provide information and try to obtain substantial assistance,” the former prosecutor, Vanessa S. Johannes, wrote in an email.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/nyregion/proud-boys-informant-enrique-tarrio.html

Read article above this one... Read from top. First let me quote myself:

"The "intelligence" agencies hate Trump's guts. By nature, "intelligence" agencies are DEVIOUS. They are well practiced at shit-stirring. It's their bread and butter in other countries... Why not use the same tactics at home? They have their "agents provocateurs" in the crowd. These are well versed in psychological manipulations of crowds. Only a few words, not even shouted, can change an individual next to them from a law-abiding "protester" into a "stormer". "

A cooperator?... The real term is "AGENT PROVOCATEUR"... Not new... Otherwise known as snitches or spies or double agents or working for the police "undercover"...

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 4, the intelligence division of the United States Capitol Police issued a report listing all the groups known to be descending on the city and planning to rally for President Donald J. Trump two days later, such as the Prime Time Patriots, the MAGA Marchers and Stop the Steal.

The dispatch, a kind of threat matrix, gave low odds that any of the groups might break laws or incite violence, labeling the chances as “improbable,” “highly improbable” or “remote.” But the document, which was not previously disclosed, never addressed the odds of something else happening: that the groups might join together in a combustible mix, leading to an explosion of violence.

But just a day earlier the same office had presented a slightly more ominous picture. The Capitol Police’s intelligence division, which draws on information from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, warned of desperation about “the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election” and the potential for significant danger to law enforcement and the public.

The documents show how the police and federal law enforcement agencies produced inconsistent and sometimes conflicting assessments of the threat from American citizens marching on the Capitol as Mr. Trump sought to hold on to power. That lack of clarity in turn helps explain why the government did not bring more urgency to security preparations for a worst-case outcome.

But the decision in the face of muddled intelligence to take only limited measures to bolster security and prepare backup highlights another issue: whether, as some critics have long said, agencies that have spent two decades and billions of dollars reacting aggressively to intelligence about the potential for Islamic terrorism are similarly focused on the full array of threats from the homegrown far right.

“Since 9/11, law enforcement has followed a ‘no stone left unturned’ policy when there is even a scintilla of evidence that a Muslim supports terrorism and has routinely targeted social movements as terrorists,” said Faiza Patel, a director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. “But it has refused to take seriously the threat of far-right violent actors.”

Steven A. Sund, who resigned as the Capitol Police chief after Jan. 6, said in a previously undisclosed letter sent on Monday to congressional leaders that the “entire intelligence community seems to have missed” the warning signs.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/us/politics/capitol-riot-domestic-terrorism.html

You are lucky that we are not conspiracy theorists on this site, but are willing to explore potential intent by the authorities to underplay the threats: "the “entire intelligence community seems to have missed” the warning signs." said Steven A. Sund. Yes, sure. The intelligence agencies are geared to assess threats with a millimetre accuracy, while providing "a reading of the past, present and future situations". Could the agencies have decided to minimise the possibility of a "storming of the capitol" DELIBERATELY?

This would make the Republican lawmakers lower their trousers in defeat and clear the deck for Biden, rather than them trying to deliberate the value of a Biden presidency... As well this would badly reflect on Donald Trump, which the Swamp wanted to get rid of as soon as possible, like urgently now... Should you have police and troops blocking the entrance and surroundings of the capitol, the theatre of the storming of the Capitol would be a fizzer... IT HAD TO BE LET happen to a point... There I've said it. They knew it was going to happen. Then we bury the dead police with full honour, should something nasty happen... Honour, flags, hands on chest, theatre of the Swamp...

This is only a theory. The only problem is that the "intelligence" agencies knew in advance what was going to happen AND they LET IT HAPPEN for political perception advantage. Clever. Add a few "agents provocateurs" in the "riot" and the wish of the "intelligence" agencies comes better than true. Trump has really become toast, especially in the Republican ranks. Add impeachment to the cake, and "you have a cherry on top..." (words used by the high echelons of the NSA).

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Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.

First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday's ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration.”

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/as-the-insurrection-narrative-crumbles

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